


The Gifted

by southspinner



Series: The Gifted [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Modern Magic, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-03 23:11:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 42,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2891591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You hear about the Gifted around campfires and in the dark at slumber parties. Kids with strange powers that no one can explain. Kids who just disappear one day, never to be heard from again. You hear about the Gifted, and your parents tell you to hush, say that you’re too old to believe in scary stories. The year is 2042, and Marco Bodt has never been one to believe in scary stories - but he’s about to star in one of his very own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

I can’t think.

The wailing of the alarms and the red flash of the emergency lighting invades my brain and chases all coherency away. My hands are shaking and I don’t know why. My head is pounding, but I can’t tell if it’s from the sirens or from the burnout that’s sapping every scrap of energy left in me. A million miles (ten feet) away, there’s a gunshot. Someone screams.

Hands are pushing at me, strong hands, familiar hands, Jean’s eyes wide and scared beneath the blood-matted blonde hair hanging in his face as he shoves me out of the hallway. “Go! We’ll hold them off as long as we can, _go!_ ”

Purpose. A task. I’ve been trained for grace under pressure, but it’s a little different when there are real bullets flying and real people dying. The burnout roars in my head and in my limbs and in the substructure of my cells as I concentrate on the door, try to will the impassive metal to move. It shudders briefly and stills, the effort a waste. I’m spent. We’re all dead.

Another gunshot. Someone yells for Armin, and the hallway behind us goes up in flames. Mikasa’s the only one that’s still at full capacity, but she’ll burn out in minutes trying to hold the front guard on her own. I can’t move the door, the timer on our ability to protect ourselves is ticking, and this is the beginning of the end.

“It’s no use. We’ve got to keep moving,” I rasp, choking on the air left fire-dry by Mikasa’s last line of defense. “If we stay here they’ll pick us off like fish in a barrel, we don’t need--”

“We have to know. There’s no point in getting out if we don’t _know_.” Jean’s been fighting the exhaustion tugging at him since Level Two, but he pulls at some hidden reserve of strength, a scream colliding with the backs of his clenched teeth from the pain of calling on depleted power when he slams a hand against the door and the whole thing caves inwards, three inches of solid steel tearing like wet paper.

“Jean!” I shout over the chaos, not thinking how ludicrous it is that I’m concerned for how peaky he looks when we’re all literally being shot at.

His entire body shakes, outline blurry as he tries to quell himself back into homeostasis. He is so weak, trying to take a step and crumpling to the floor instead. Our eyes lock. “Hurry.”

I swallow the terror rising like bile in my throat and sprint, vaulting through the hole where the door was and into an opulently furnished office, a heavy mahogany desk with a streamlined computer on its surface. The passcode written on the back of my hand is smeared with sweat and soot and blood, but it’s still readable, trembling fingers punching it into the sleek keyboard. A few keystrokes, and the world opens up. Years of lies, a secret so big the world can’t hold it, the true reality of who and what I am. It’s all been here all along.

_Loading… Loading… Loading…_

_Passcode Accepted. Tier 1 Files Accessed._

“We have to fall back!” A loud whoosh, a flicker of light, a pained groan. Mikasa’s hit her burnout. I can’t see Eren, but I can hear him, his voice Dopplering around the corridor. “Forget it; just get out!”

“I just got into the system!” I’m frantically scanning file titles, clicking what looks promising and opening them in separate windows. We’ve come too far for me to run now.

_MEMO_   
_Attn: Project Hecate Tier 1 Administrators_   
_Subject: 12/15 Facility 1A Incident_

_As of yet, there has been no progress in recovering any remnants of the serum from what remains of the lab. What product there was seems to have been taken by Dr. Zoë upon their desertion, along with any information about the composition. While the loss of 1A is a tremendous setback, the primary objective has always been and remains the continues progress of the project. The directive now is to locate Hanji Zoë and apprehend them alive. The creator of The Gifted is an asset that this project cannot afford to lose._

“Hanji Zoë,” I whisper, skimming the rest of the memo and clicking over to the next file.

_MEMO_   
_Attn: Project Hecate Tier 1 Administrators_   
_Re: Subject 143A72_

_Diverting the public eye from the destruction of Facility 3A has proved to be far from the most difficult task surrounding the incident. The surviving Gifted have been relocated to 2B, and training and research have resumed as usual. However, to put the rumors to rest, this memo serves as confirmation that Subject 143A72 is indeed missing in action, and that it is in fact believed that he was instrumental in 3A’s destruction. The reconnaissance team is currently out for tracking and retrieval, but has not reported any success--_

Nothing there, other than an old legend apparently having roots in truth. A few more clicks, quickly processed information, names and locations of facilities. It’s enough. We know enough.

“Hurry up!” Eren shouts.

I’m going to exit out of the files when I see it sitting there.

_Subject 582B15._

Jean.

“Give me a minute!”

_Loading… Loading… Loading…_

More gunshots. A silent chill and the hair on the back of my neck standing up as Ymir sends out a wave, and two seconds later the hall is filled with screams. They’ve bought me time.

_\--the earliest known instance of power manifestation. It is then to be inferred that given time, other subjects with early power manifestation might also be created in this manner, but at the current time the process is simply too expensive and too volatile, with too high of a margin for error. 582B15 is the only subject to survive to date. Given the facts, we are therefore left with no choice but to halt the research at Facility 4A, and reallocate funds--_

“No way.” I read the lines over and over, caught between denial and horror. “It can't be.”

“Marco, get out of there!” Eren’s voice is ragged, panicked, but it doesn’t come in time to warn me before there’s a guard standing in the doorway and a red dot on my chest.

I’ve seen too much. I know too much. The man pointing a gun at me and I both know this.

We learned in combat training that it’s possible for the human psyche to slow things down in times of extreme stress, make you feel like you’re swimming through syrup just to take a step or duck and cover. In reality, everything is happening in a fraction of a second, but to you it feels like an eternity. I never really thought that I’d be standing here at eighteen, the unholy product of science and magic, living out the last half-second of my life in a false forever drawn out by my own adrenaline.

They say your life flashes before your eyes, sometimes. It’s not me riding a tricycle or blowing out candles on a birthday cake that I see, though. It’s the past few months; it’s everything that led to this moment. A set of car keys sliding across a desk, the creaking metal of a rusted lighting rig in the theater, the last goodbye my mother ever gave me. Scratchy sheets and hospital beds. Jean. Jean’s eyes and Jean’s petulant scowls and the raspy gravel of Jean’s voice, training gyms and dark closets and whispers in the night about dreams of a world he’s never even seen.

I promised him we’d watch the sunrise together.

The world speeds up again. There’s a flash of light from the guard’s gun barrel, an impact like a train hitting me in the chest, and then everything goes white.

 


	2. A Therapeutic Chain of Events

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the anesthetic never set in and i'm wondering where  
> the apathy and urgency is that i thought i phoned in  
> it's not so pleasant and it's not so conventional  
> it sure as hell ain't normal, but we deal, we deal
> 
> _panic! at the disco, "camisado"

_six months earlier_

I can’t think.

There was some study I read about once that involved teenagers not having proper brain function until ten in the morning or something. One would think that with as far as the human race has advanced, with all the leaps forward in knowledge and technology, _something_ would result in a world that puts me anywhere other than pawing at a blaring alarm at six in the morning on a Wednesday, groaning and eyes clenched shut.

My stumbling fingers find the snooze button, but the next thing I know, I’m drooling into my pillow and Mom is flicking the overhead light on with an utter lack of mercy, ignoring my pathetic groan as I try to burrow down beneath my blankets. “Marco! Up! Breakfast’s on the table!”

“Fi’ more minutes.”

“Uh-uh, _cariño_ , you are not getting another speeding ticket because you left this house late again, now _up!_ ” The lights flicker on and off. Her shadow doesn’t move from the doorway. I weigh my options and decide that fatigue is better than incurring Latina Mom Wrath this early in the morning, rolling out of bed with squinty eyes and a weird crick in my neck.

My brain's still sluggish as I grope around the nightstand for my Bangle, snapping the thin blue plastic around my wrist and prodding it awake until the little projector on the underside flickers to life and the home screen of my OS appears on the inside of my forearm, the background interrupted by the occasional freckle. April 16, 2042.

I scroll through my feed while I'm standing in the shower, a fingertip prodding at my skin and the rest of me regaining consciousness neuron by sparking neuron. It's too early for most of my friends to be up, so the feed's mostly my older relatives and my parents' friends talking about everything going on overseas, four armies clashing over a scrap of land that was inconsequential until about twenty years ago. They've been calling it the Kashmir Conflict since then. No one's got the guts to call it what it is - World War Three.

The thing about Kashmir, they tell us in Civics classes and on the news feed, is that it's been the ideal breeding ground of a perfect storm for years. A valley in the Himalayas, rich in resources and nestled between the grabbing hands of China, India, and Pakistan, all three claiming ownership. You put the world's two largest populations and another significant military power in a pressure cooker, it's bound to explode sometime. As far as anyone can tell, said explosion happened back when my parents were just kids, starting with small skirmishes that slowly became more violent.

The US didn't step in until 2030, when I was in first grade and Michael was in fifth. I still remember the fear in all the grownups' faces and the hushed whispers of _nuclear_ over our tiny, blissfully ignorant heads. "Maintaining order," the Congressional declaration of war said. United States, world police, international babysitter, "If you kids can't learn to share then I'm going to take it."

I'm sure it seemed like a great idea until people started dying in droves. It probably sounded wonderful until the trade embargoes came crashing down and the war expanded up into East Asia and China's productivity levels crashed, and the world spent the start of the 2040's descending into pre-capitalist chaos. It probably looked like a worthy enterprise until the question had to be addressed of whether or not there would even be a Kashmir left to fight over by the time the blood dried.

Reading about cities being bombed to nothing is a little heavy for a high school senior barely keeping his eyes open at a ridiculous hour of the morning, and everything on the feed's more loud patriotism than actual news anyway, so I swipe out and wash the shampoo out of my hair before punching up the voice interface on my Bangle and mumbling, "Vid-call Mina."

For the most part, they don't even make mobile devices with vid-call functions anymore. Ever since companies started putting out eyescreens, the market's turned towards mobile technology that requires outpatient surgery to operate, inner-ear receivers and larynx mics and the like. But Mom's weird about stuff like that, says it all sounds dangerous, and Mina has astigmatism so bad that there isn't an eyescreen on the market that will work for her, so we're both rocking our ancient Bangles for the foreseeable future.

The little camera indicator light clicks on, and I'm looking at my own dripping head and shoulders in a small window while the tinny speaker rattles out the call tone.

Mina picks up on the fourth ring, sporting a case of serious brunette bedhead and sitting behind a bowl of cereal, about as awake as I am. "Hey, what's-- _woah hi you're naked._ "

"Your wildest dreams come true today," I deadpan, trying to rub soap out of my eye.

"I can hardly contain myself," Mina drawls back, and this is why she's been my best friend since we were in diapers. Sarcasm's no fun if it's a one-sided game. "Why are you vid-calling me in your birthday suit so early in the morning?"

Around a yawn, I ask her, "Did you do the Calc homework?"

"I'm not letting you copy my homework."

_"Mina!"_

"No! You've been leeching off my intellect since kindergarten; and it stops today!"

"I had a soccer game last night!"

She grumbles, and I fix her with my best kicked-puppy pout. Finally, Mina sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "I'll give it to you first period. Last time. This is the last time."

“You love me,” I grin, prodding at the faulty interface screen beneath the showerhead that Dad refuses to get fixed until the water finally turns off.

“Go put your clothes on, Marco,” she groans, disconnecting the call.

I try to climb out of the shower while simultaneously pressing the button to put my Bangle screen on sleep mode, and the resulting distraction ends up with me tripping over a shampoo bottle and crashing to the floor, knocking every toiletry in the room down into the shower with a clatter. By the time I get to my feet and manage to wrangle a towel from somewhere, there’s an ominous form lurking in the bathroom door.

“It is six thirty in the godforsaken morning,” says my big brother, looking murderous.

There are a few things that the outside observer needs to understand about the dynamics of the Bodt family for anything we do to make sense, and the first and foremost of these are that my older brother Michael effectively makes it his business to undermine anything anyone’s ever told him to do. He joined a rock band in high school instead of taking up the offer to be on the basketball team. After graduation, he decided that the band was going to make it big, got a lip piercing and a day job at Hot Topic instead of going to college. After the initial dust-up, Mom and Dad are okay with him being twenty-two and still living at home (“We don’t have to agree with you to love you; it’s our job to make sure you’re safe and happy.” Seriously. It could have gone a _lot_ worse.), mostly because Mom’s got reverse psychology down so well that she realizes that getting anything done is as simple as telling Michael not to do it. And really, in the wide world of parents, ours aren’t so bad, so he doesn’t give them too much trouble.

I, on the other hand, am not as lucky, cornered in the bathroom with a towel around my waist while Michael stands in the doorway, hair a black cloud around his head and eyes the same shade of brown as mine narrowed into dangerous slits. “I got in bed three hours ago.”

“That’s not my fault,” I scoff, shoving past him into the hallway and heading for my room. “By the way, I’m borrowing your car.”

“The hell you are!”

“Michael, language!” Mom yells from downstairs.

“The starter in mine died on Monday and Dad hasn’t gotten it in at the shop yet,” I shout down the hall once I’ve pulled a t-shirt and jeans on, searching around the mess on top of my desk for a hairbrush. “So unless you wanna drive me…”

Michael’s still in the bathroom when I head down to his bedroom, an utter disaster in comparison to mine. Barely even sparing me a glance in the mirror, he rolls his eyes and goes back to ransacking the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen. “Fine. But if you or any of your shithead friends--”

_“Michael!”_

“Sorry, Ma!” he yells down the stairs before redirecting his attention to me. “I mean it, twerp, if there’s a scratch on that car when I get it back, I’m taking the repairs out of your hide.”

“I’m a better driver than you are, man; you’ve totaled two since you got your license. Chill.” It’s impossible to find anything in Michael’s room. The whole place is a mess of half-decomposed microwavable snack foods, dirty laundry, and torn concert fliers. The bathroom light clicks off, and I figure he must be headed back in to crash back onto his unmade bed. “Hey, Mick, toss me your keys.”

A sharp jingle behind me, and I put my hand up just in time to grab the car keys out of midair, twirling the keyring around my finger. “Thanks.”

Michael pokes his head around the doorframe and says, “Thanks for what?”

“For giving me the keys.”

He blinks. “I didn’t.”

I roll my eyes. “Uh-huh.”

“No, seriously, dude, I was just in your room ‘cause I needed to use your deodorant.”

“Then who…” I start, turning around and looking at the messy but very decidedly empty expanse of Michael’s room.

Shaking my head, I let it drop and duck back out into the hallway. He’s just messing with me. I’m going to be late enough as it is.

For what it’s worth, I at least _try_ to slip out unnoticed before Mom catches me and drags me back with shrill commands that I’m not leaving the house until I eat something. It’d be endearing if it weren’t making me late for the third time this week. Still, I know better than to fight her on it. After growing up in Panama in a dirt-poor family that never had enough to eat, feeding people is how my mom shows affection, simple as that. So I sit and smile around mouthfuls of huevos rancheros and mutter that everything tastes great, because it makes her smile as she floats around the kitchen picking up dishes in her wake.

“So, uh. I’ve been saving up my allowance,” I tell her, trying to sound offhanded.

“You’re not getting an eyescreen, _chiquito_ ,” she says. Shut down in five seconds flat.

“But Mom--”

“ _No_ , Marco.” The dishes settle in the sink with a final-sounding clink of porcelain on metal, but Mom looks like she’s really trying not to be mean when she sinks into the open chair beside me and presses a bird-boned hand to my cheek. “With the economy the way it’s going, the extra service charges on one of those things is too much. Your father works enough overtime as it is.”

“Mick has one,” I grumble.

“Michael is twenty-two years old and pays his own bills,” she points out, petting my damp hair into place. “And even then, I’m still not happy about it. We paid good money for those pretty eyes; I don’t want to see some butcher of an eyescreen surgeon messing them up.”

Ah, the ‘we paid good money for...’ card. She always pulls this when she doesn’t have a good argument.

Michael and I are what Mom has always called _niños milagrosos,_ miracle children, although I’m not sure what part of science she defines as a miracle. The only thing miraculous that I can see about the whole thing is that she and Dad managed to scrape up enough money for two designer babies. There are fertility clinics out there that use the most cutting-edge genetic technology to give you just about whatever you want - in our parents’ case, two beautiful baby boys with big brown eyes and smooth black hair and skin full of freckles from the tiny fraction of us that’s apparently Belgian, only visible in our surname and whatever digging around in our gene pool turned up. An utter lack of potential for hereditary diseases and a guarantee of perfect 20/20 vision were thrown in at a discount - but the rest came with a hefty price tag. I’ve never been rude enough to ask if they took out loans when they found out that Mom couldn’t have kids without help. Either way, Dad’s been working overtime for about as long as I can remember, and despite living in a big, nice house, I’ve heard my share of hushed arguments about money in the dead of night when my parents thought Mick and I were sleeping. The ‘we paid good money for...’ card never fails to guilt me into silence. I shut up about the eyescreen for the umpteenth time.

Mom’s lips quirk up in a sad little smile, and she leans over to press a kiss to the top of my head as she gets up to take my dishes off the table. “Think of it this way. You’re graduating in a month, and then you can run off to college and go crazy and do whatever you want. You’ll miss me harping on you someday, _cariño_ , I guarantee it.”

And maybe I will. I’ll miss my family when I get on a plane to Indiana this September to start my freshman year at Purdue, but they’re the only thing I’ll regret leaving behind. I won’t miss the neon glare and choking heat of Las Vegas, and I won’t miss being stuck in a life where I feel like I don’t quite belong. Michael was brave enough to cut his ties in one fell swoop and dare anyone to say something about it. I’m not. Despite the reassurance of my parents’ unconditional love and support - after all, they spent good money that would be wasted in disowning me - the thought of being a disappointment has never been one that I’ve handled well. Life’s been easier to live with the goal of being what people want until I get the chance to craft something better for myself.

So I get Purdue. I get a blank slate. I get a few years to figure out who I actually am before I have to decide what to do with it. It’s a small comfort, and it’s also five months away. Best not to dwell on it now.

“You’ll call to harp on me. I won’t have to miss it,” I tell Mom, kissing her on the cheek and heading up the front hallway to grab my backpack. “I gotta go. If I’m not home from practice before dinner I’ll grab takeout or something.”

“Be careful! Your brother’s car has a different OS than yours; remember to--”

“I know how to work a car, Mom, I’ll be fine. I love you.” The front door shuts behind me, and I can finally breathe.

My brother’s well-used Toyota is about as messy as his room. I have to brush crumpled fast food bags down into the floorboards to find a place to sit my backpack in the passenger’s seat, trying to ignore the smear of something that looks like Cheetos dust on the ignition button when I punch it. The keys give a little beep in my pocket, and the engine turns over, the touch screen on the dash lighting up. The OS stalls for a second - it’s used to connecting to Mick’s eyescreen and can’t detect it when he’s still in the house - and sputters to life, blinking on the cracked screen. It takes a minute of poking and prodding to bring up the interface, since I’m used to the one in my Ford, but I get the radio turned on and the backup camera rolling without too much trouble. The car backs out of our driveway, and I take the turns out of our neighborhood on mental autopilot, watching the headlights and the suburban sprawl roll by outside the windows.

Summerlin isn’t Vegas in title or law, but technically its own city, so we got all the worst parts without any of the gratification. The neon glow on the horizon at night, the pollution problem, and the drunk tourists winding up in backyards at four in the morning.

And the traffic.

I only bother with trying to drive independently for about ten minutes until I hit the freeway and get frustrated enough to click on the cruise control. Michael’s car is old, but it isn’t so old that it doesn’t have proximity sensors that will override the brakes and keep me from rear-ending anyone. I hold the wheel in place with one hand and wake up my Bangle with the other, scrolling down through my feed to distract myself from the claustrophobia of bumper to bumper morning traffic. More war stuff and stuffy relatives, but a few people from school are online now, bored-posting from the bus or the backs of their parents’ cars. Hitch Dreyse is trying to get a bunch of people together to go to the Strip for her birthday tonight. I check the ‘maybe’ box on the invitation with the full knowledge that Mom would convulse if I went within fifty yards of a casino now that I’m old enough to legally walk into one. ‘Maybe’ is softer than ‘no,’ even if it carries the same end result.

Absolutes have never been my forte. The fact that I can’t do or say anything that isn’t some shade of gray is probably a glaring indicator that I’m incapable of making decisions for myself. I wonder how long it’ll take me to fall flat on my face at college without someone else’s expectations to hold me upright.

The traffic thins out while I’m still staring at my feed having an early-morning existential crisis over some cheerleader’s birthday party, and I don’t notice the protesting whine of the revving engine, don’t feel the acceleration. It’s reflex to keep the car in my lane, practiced, muscle memory. Normalcy is easy. I’ve gotten a little too content with it after a lifetime. I got up and went to school yesterday, and the day before, and weeks and months and years before that. I’ll get up and go to school tomorrow, and for weeks after, and then I’ll graduate. And then. Something. Something will happen. But I don’t think about it today.

I don’t think about it today, because today, a stray cat decides to run out in front of the car at the bottom of the exit ramp.

It’s one of those things where you know what’s going to happen before it actually does. The cat’s too small for the proximity sensors to pick it up. My reaction time isn’t quick enough to slam on the brakes, even though I try. I grit my teeth and brace myself for a lifetime of guilt over my impending vehicular kitty-slaughter and an even longer lifetime of Michael whining about me making a mess of his new tires.

And then the cat flies away.

This is the part where I’m lucid dreaming, where I wake up in bed with Mom yelling that I’m going to be late and everything from my alarm going off this morning has just been an incredibly realistic series playing in my head, because this isn’t reality. There’s no reality or law of physics that can literally _pick a cat up into the air_ , confused and squawling, and fling it away from its certain demise in front of the car. The brakes screech, leaving a smear of burnt rubber on the pavement behind me. A long moment passes. The cat flew twenty feet to the embankment on the other side of the road. It looks at me, hisses, and disappears under a shrub.

I haven’t woken up yet.

And I don’t wake up. Around the corner and down the street and through the rat-race of traffic into the Palo Verde High School parking lot, and I don’t wake up. Ducking in the front doors with people talking to me smiles and small conversation, and I don’t wake up. Hanging out at Mina’s locker before first period, and I don’t wake up, I don’t wake up, why am I not waking up?

I think about pinching myself in some cliché effort to drag myself back to the real world, but a sleepy, exasperated Mina beats me to the punch, walking up behind me while I’m still zoned out and digging two bony fingers into my side with a painful tickle that makes me twitch. “You’re blocking my locker, Bodt. Better move it if you want your contraband Calc homework.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sorry.” I’m still stuck in my own head. Maybe I just imagined it. People see things that aren’t there sometimes as a panic response, right? Maybe it was all just a blur of adrenaline messing with my head.

There was no blur. Everything stays at the front of my mind, sharp and absolute. I know what I saw. I know that it’s impossible. The trouble I’m having reconciling those two facts is making everything else go kind of murky.

“So _move_ , genius.” Mina rolls her dark eyes, a pigtail flopping over her shoulder as she hip-checks me out of the way and scans her student ID on the locker’s reader, waiting for it to process with a loud clunk before she yanks the door open. I stand there staring at nothing. Frowning, she snaps her fingers in front of my nose. “Hey. You been into your brother’s pot or something? Wakey wakey.”

“No. I just.”

“You’re _just_ freaking me out with the whole space cadet thing,” she snorts, elbowing her locker shut and herding me down the hallway. Mina coats everything in a thin veneer of vitriol, but there’s genuine concern in her expression when she looks over at me as we walk into Spanish and drop our stuff on our desks. “You’re acting glitchy, Marco. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” I lie, scrubbing a hand down the side of my face. “Just having a weird morning.”

“Weird how?”

“Flying cats,” I mumble.

Mina stares at me for a second, shakes her head, and goes back to the conjugations she was supposed to have done last night.

The rest of the day crawls by, and I can’t shake the feeling of being not-quite-real that’s followed me around since morning. High school is Darwinism at its best, though, survival of the fittest, and a chink in the armor means going down and getting trampled by a stampede. So I play along. I do what I’ve always done best and give people what they want. I joke with Mina over the noisy roar of the cafeteria, watch her relax as she lets herself believe that I’m out of my weird funk. I sit next to Hitch Dreyse in Theater class and politely explain that I won’t make it to her birthday because I’ve got a family thing and it’s totally lame but I’ll be watching the feed for pictures and stuff, absolutely, have a great eighteenth. I go to soccer practice after the final bell, run hard and try to lose myself in my heartbeat, loud and solid in my ears.

There’s a moment when an airborne ball hits the ground and rolls under my foot a little _too_ conveniently, but I tell myself that it’s a fluke.

Mina’s leaning against the wall outside the locker room door when I walk out with damp hair and a somewhat clearer head, her face tight and eyes flashing hurt as she swipes something off the interface of her Bangle and clicks it into sleep mode before I can see it.

“You okay?” I ask.

She nods, a stiff up-and-down jerk of her head, and pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “Never better. Hey, can you drive me home? Sam bailed on me again.”

“And just left you stranded here for like two hours?” Frowning, I dig Michael’s car keys out of my duffel bag and set off across the parking lot with her. “When are you gonna dump him, Mina? He’s a jerk to you and pretty much everyone else in the universe.”

“He’s not so bad,” says Mina, fiddling with the end of one of her pigtails. “Besides, all the nice ones are taken. Or, you know. You.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Gross.”

“Yeah, gross. So stop ragging on my boyfriend unless you wanna take one for the team and date me.”

It’s not like it would be that bad of a situation. Our families have both been planning mine and Mina’s wedding since we were about seven anyway. She’s pretty, and smart, and she makes me laugh on at least an hourly basis. I trust her. She’s my best friend. But throwing anything romantic into that just feels weird. We had that talk about a year ago and came to an instant agreement on that front. Mina said I was like her brother. I said she just wasn’t my type. She sat on the end of my bed and fixed me with the most victorious smirk and said, _I knew it._

And now here we are, sitting in my brother’s car, gunning the cranky old engine up onto the freeway. I feel a little better with her here, not so much like the walls of Mick’s Toyota are crushing in on me from all sides.

“So, flying cats,” Mina says somewhere between the exit ramp and the front gate of her neighborhood.

I jerk the steering wheel. She stares at me, waiting for an answer.

“Nothing.” It’s easier to wave her off than to try to explain it. She wouldn’t believe me if I did. Of all the people in the world, I need Mina to think I’m sane. If she believes it, I can make myself believe it too. “I almost hit a cat on the way to school this morning. I was already glitchy from sleep deprivation and everything, and it just kind of wigged me out.”

“You sure that’s it?”

“No, Mina, an actual cat sprouted wings right in front of me and ascended like Kitty Jesus into the heavens.” A little bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

She chokes on a laugh, but shifts to something more serious when I pull into her driveway, something worried in her eyes magnified behind her glasses lenses when she grabs her backpack from the back seat and turns to me. “I just… you know you can tell me if something’s wrong, right? Like, anything. I don’t care how dumb it sounds. If you’ve got something weird going on, you can come to me with it.”

I think the weird limitations of her offer cut off somewhere before magic flying cats. I ignore how perfectly-timed her statement was, raising an eyebrow and asking her, “Where’s this coming from?”

“It’s coming from me feeling like there’s something you’re not telling me!” Mina snaps back, a little too defensive given the nature of the question. She catches herself, though, sighing and reaching up to scratch at the back of my head, messing up my hair. “I look out for you. It’s what I do. God knows you’re too damn nice to look out for yourself.”

“I know.” I give her the best smile I can muster, unlocking the car so she can get out. “I’m okay, I promise. I’ll vid-call you later to help you with that thing for Spanish, okay?”

“Yeah. And tell your brother to clean out his car. It’s disgusting.”

I could tell her that the state of my brother’s car is the last thing on my mind right now, and that even if it weren’t, telling Michael to do anything is a surefire way to guarantee that it won’t happen any time in the next century. Instead, I just give Mina a little salute after she shuts the passenger door, pulling out of her driveway and traveling the two blocks to my own house in silence.

Mom’s feeling merciful. That’s the only explanation for me being able to talk my way out of dinner with the excuse that I’ve got a ton of homework, retreating to my room and dropping my stuff on the floor. Flopping back across my bed, I stare up at the ceiling, still wondering why I haven’t woken up yet. Flying cats. Flying cats and something else, something that’s felt _wrong_ all day and I just can’t remember.

“Marco!” Michael yells from down the hallway, over the sound of water running in the shower. “I need my keys back, man! They called me in to cover the rest of Gia’s shift at work because she’s got some sort of gnarly stomach virus and puked all over the new fall line display or something.”

“M’kay,” I half-shout back, turning my head to the side and letting out a little groan when I see Mick’s keys sitting on the opposite side of my desk. That means getting up to go get them instead of just throwing them at his head as he walks back from the bathroom. I stretch out my arm anyway, wondering how much I’d have to contort to grab them without leaving my bed.

The keys shoot across the desk and into my hand.

We were raised to be good, polite boys, my brother and I, to open doors for people and help old ladies across the street and to never, ever curse.

The keys shoot across the desk and into my hand, and I whisper, “What the _fuck_.”

The bathroom door opens and closes. Michael walks past my room tugging a ratty band shirt over his head and sticks a tattooed arm through the door, giving me an impatient glare. “Bro. Keys?”

I’m sitting up in my bed, staring down at my hand. Dinky metal keyring, house keys and register keys for Hot Topic and the beat-up plastic fob with the Toyota logo half rubbed off, lame macrame keychain with MAB braided into it that Mom and Dad brought back from their anniversary trip to Cabo a few years ago. The keys. It was the keys that started all of this, throwing themselves across an empty room this morning. I’d told myself that Mick was messing with me.

“You’re such a lazy little shit,” he scoffs, ducking into my room and snatching them before retreating down the stairs.

I sit there and stare at my empty palms, heart crawling into my throat. I’m still like that four hours later when the sky outside my window is dark and Michael rolls back in from work.

He walks past my room and then slowly backpedals, tilting his head to the side. “Dude. Have you _moved_ since I left?”

“I’ve had a really weird day,” I reply, like that’s an answer.

“Yeah?” I’ll say this much for Michael: he’s made our mom cry a lot and generally likes breaking rules and being a headache, but when you need him to actually be a big brother, he steps up to the plate. He flicks my light on, and I wince at the sudden, bright onslaught, blinking to adjust as he walks over and plops down on the edge of the bed. “You okay? Do I need to kick someone’s ass?”

It’s too bright in here. My hands feel like they’re buzzing.

“Hey, Marco.” Michael waves a hand in front of my face, stooping over like he’s checking to see if there’s any light left behind my eyes. “Talk to me, _hermano_. You look like you’ve got shell shock or something.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“I think…” There’s a lead weight on my chest. It’s hard to breathe. “I think there’s something weird. With me.”

Michael blinks.

“I mean that some weird things have happened to me. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

“Oh my God.” A slow, elated grin stretches out across his face, and he lays back across my mattress with a cackle. “Oh my _God_ , man, I knew this day would come. I’m so happy that you chose to share this with me. Our brotherly love score totally just skyrocketed.”

“Share what with you?” I frown, confused.

Mick sits back up. “You’re coming out. Right?”

I somehow manage to choke on my own spit.

“Oh, come on, it’s not like you’re the first person in the family to be queerer than a football bat.” Rolling his eyes, he holds up his arm and shakes it so that the little pink-yellow-blue wristband he picked up when Hot Topic was selling stuff for Pride month rattles on his wrist. “Dad’ll come around, and Mom doesn’t care who you bring home as long as you bring _someone_ home for her to cook for.”

“That’s not…” I wheeze, pounding a fist against my chest to try to get my lungs to start working normally again.

“That’s not it?” Michael asks, looking genuinely disappointed. I nod. He stares at me for a second, contemplative. “Okay but you _are_ gay, right, because I’ve had a bet with--”

_“Mick!”_

“Sorry, sorry!” He puts his hands up like I’m the one who should feel bad for snapping, giving me this stupid kicked puppy look as he lets them drop back into his lap. “Okay, so weird stuff. Something weird with you. Continue.”

“I think I’m Matilda,” I tell him with a completely straight face.

“What.”

“You know, that lame movie that Mom loved when she was little and made us watch a thousand times when we were kids,” I explain, stiff-jointed fingers clenching creakily in front of me. “The little girl who could move things with her mind. I think I’m Matilda.”

Michael laughs so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t wake up the whole house.

“I’m serious!” I protest, punching him in the arm and thinking about withdrawing my former sentiment about him being a good big brother. “Look, I just… Your keys. This morning, I thought you threw me your keys, and you said you didn’t, but _something_ threw them, I swear. And then on the way to school there was this flying cat…”

The laughter turns to _howls_ , tears streaking down my brother’s face as he collapses back onto my bed clutching his stomach in painful mirth.

“And then when you asked for your keys back earlier they _slid across my desk into my hand,_ dude, I saw it with my own eyes!”

Michael’s cackling eventually dies down to a bubbling snicker, and he wipes at his eyes as he sits up. “Holy shit, you honestly think that.”

“What else am I supposed to think?” My voice cracks on the upswing of the question, and I feel disgustingly like I’m about to cry. “I mean… maybe I’m one of those weird ESP people you see on TV that can tell what’s on cards from the other side of a wall and see dead people and stuff.”

“Maybe you’re Gifted,” Mick snorts.

“Maybe I’m _what?_ ”

“You know, The Gifted?” he says, waving his hand like he’s referencing something I’m supposed to have heard before. “That bullshit urban legend that people always told at sleepovers and summer camp?”

Doesn’t ring any bells. I shake my head.

“The Gifted are these kids with _spooky_ supernatural powers,” Michael explains, flicking the penlight on his keychain to life and holding it beneath his chin to cast shadows for dramatic effect as he wiggles his fingers and bites back a laugh. “Some people say they’re wizards. Some people say they’re some freaky mutant government experiment. No one really knows what they are. But sometimes little kids start doing _strange_ stuff, bringing dead flowers back to life, making their stuffed animals spontaneously combust… levitating cats.”

“Shut up,” I snap, throwing a pillow at him.

He snickers and dodges it, continuing the story. “And as soon as they start showing these powers… they disappear. Maybe it’s their coven coming to get them. Maybe their handlers are whisking them off to a lab somewhere. But once The Gifted go missing, they’re never heard from again, whooooooo, _scary_.”

“If you’re gonna be a jerk about it, just go away!”

My voice is raw, betraying too much hurt. Michael hears it, clicks his flashlight off with a frown. “Hey, I was just messin’ with you, _hombre_. You seem really wigged; I was trying to make you laugh.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not funny.” Not when I know it’s impossible. Not when it’s been curled around my chest like a vise for hours despite that knowledge. Ridiculous things are never funny to the person they’re tearing apart.

“Look, Marco,” he sighs, reaching up and planting a hand on my shoulder. “You’re stressed. You’ve got big games for soccer coming up, finals, graduation, packing for college. You don’t sleep, you barely eat. You’re stressing yourself half to death, man. And if you want my honest, professional slacker opinion, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re so stressed that you’re imagining things.”

“I know what I--”

“You _think_ you know what you saw.” Michael digs his keys out of his pocket, planting them on my desk with a metallic rattle. “Move them.”

“What?” My throat goes dry.

“If you’re Matilda or an ESP Guy or fucking Gifted or whatever, move the keys,” he says with a sharp nod towards the desk. “You supposedly did it earlier. Shouldn’t be hard, right?”

My hand is shaking when I reach out just like I did earlier, focusing hard on the keys and trying to will them into my palm. They don’t move. I try harder, squinting until my head aches. Not even a rattle.

Michael scoops them up off the desk and pockets them again, making a vague _you see?_ gesture at me. “Told you. Stress. I prescribe a daily chill regimen. Go hang out with your friends. Cut class. God forbid, smoke a bowl; it’d do wonders for your chronic tightassery. If being the ‘good child’ in the family is driving you to hallucinatory episodes, it might not be worth it.”

“Yeah,” I hum, still looking at the spot on my desk where the keys were. “Yeah, you’re right. Thanks, Mick.”

“No problem, twerp,” he grins, giving me a noogie until I beat him away with another pillow and grumble at him to get out of my room. He lingers in the doorway, though, his fingers hovering over the lightswitch. “Seriously, Marco, get some sleep. Just deal with the bullshit until graduation, and I’ll take you for celebratory debauchery on the Strip, yeah?”

“Sure, sounds great. G’night.”

My light clicks off, and my brother shuts the door behind him with a quiet creak as he heads back to his own room. I feel like I’ve got weights around my wrists and ankles, but I force myself to get up and swap out my jeans for sweatpants before collapsing back into bed, staring at the ceiling until I start to feel like it’s pressing down on me and then firing up my Bangle and checking the feed to distract myself. Lots of pictures and vid-snaps of Hitch and a bunch of my other friends running around on the Strip. They’re all clearly wasted. A direct message springs up, a five-second clip of Hitch and Mina in sparkly birthday hats shouting into Mina’s Bangle.

 _“Wish you were here, Marco!”_ Hitch slurs, and Mina laughs, eyes lit up behind her glasses as she blows a kiss into the camera. The video plays to the end, and my feed screen pops back up, equal parts school friends at parties and grownups spouting war news. Glitter and blood, music and gunfire. Worlds apart.

This whole business in Kashmir started over a tiny piece of land that too many people claimed was theirs. I guess I can relate. Trying to balance myself between the warring factions of my life has started its own kind of turmoil in me, so much pushing and pulling that I’m afraid sometimes that I’ll collapse into pieces. Marco the Good Son and Marco the Good Student and Marco the Good Friend have never found harmony with each other, squabbling over who owns me. Maybe, like in a little valley a half a world away, a fourth party will step in seeking to fix everything. Marco the Good Something. Marco the Bad Something. Marco the Okay Something. Something. Anything.

The cynics say that Kashmir will be nothing by the time everyone’s done fighting over it. Maybe my life’s been warring for salted earth without even realizing it.

And if Something is flying cats and mysterious telekinetic keys, I don’t want it. Michael can diagnose stress and seeing things all he wants, but there’s still that nagging little place in me that whispers something _more_ in an icy, terrible voice.

A framed poster falls off my wall with a loud rattle, and I sit bolt upright with a scream lodging in my throat. Sledgehammer heartbeats thud painfully against my ribs as I look at the broken frame sitting on the carpet. A second passes, five, ten. It’s a concerted effort to force myself to lie back down and breathe again.

Mick was right, I decide, ripping my Bangle off and throwing it on the charging mat for the night. If I’m so wound up that a poster could send me into a panic, then it’s not too far-fetched to believe that I could be imagining things.

Kids with spooky supernatural powers. Wizards. Freaky mutant government experiments. Flying cats.

I laugh to myself and resolve to get some sleep tonight.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)


	3. Sleeping Sickness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm afraid to sleep because of what haunts me  
> such as living with the uncertainty  
> that i'll never find the words to say  
> which would completely explain  
> just how i'm breaking down
> 
> _city and colour, "sleeping sickness"

It’s incredible how thoroughly the human mind can convince itself that something undeniable doesn’t exist through the sheer force of willpower. Over the next two weeks, I take every weird thing that happens and slap a mundane explanation on it too fast to allow myself to think of anything else.

I drop a plate while Mom has her back turned washing dishes, and it hovers midair long enough for me to catch it. Obviously an optical illusion. The curtains in my room swing shut to block out the sunlight glaring through my window while I’m lying down in an attempt to quell one of the headaches that have only grown more persistent and painful as the days pass. A cross-draft from the AC vent, of course; the things were never very sturdy anyway. A soccer ball I’m chasing after at practice does a perfect one-eighty and rolls ten feet back to land under my foot. Must have been one hell of a backspin on the kick.

Normalcy. The status quo. It’s the only way I know how to live, and the growing threat of something outside my realm of experience just can’t happen right now. Not with everything I still have to do, all the ways in which I still have to function. If I’m going to be a freak, it’s just going to have to wait until after graduation. No arguments, no concessions. I don’t have time to believe in scary stories.

Covering up the panic and shoving it down so deep that even I can’t touch it isn’t all that hard. Big smile, small talk, tell them what they expect to hear. Give the people what they want. Showbiz. I was raised in Vegas. The ol’ razzle dazzle came as quickly to me as my first steps.

The only time I can’t keep the front up is at night, when the ceiling does that pesky pressing down on me thing until I can’t breathe and I end up clawing at my sheets and my own skin, trying to shake the feeling of that _something_ that’s been there since the morning of the Flying Keys and Flying Cat, crawling around just under the surface. It’s a feeling I can’t place, uncomfortable and prickly, invisible spider-legs, a static charge waiting to go off. It’s the same feeling I get when those little coincidences that are _not_ -weird-no-not-at-all happen, but it gets so bad when my mind is left to wander that I start skimming off Mom’s sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet with Michael’s help. He used to sell his ADHD meds in middle school, knows how to hack the bio-scans on the bottles that keep them safely shut. I must really look a wreck when I come to him as a last-ditch effort. There’s no mischief in his eyes when he dumps a handful of pills into a plastic bag and tells me to hide them somewhere Mom won’t find while she’s cleaning. Just pity. Pity and worry.

I hide them behind the loose baseboard next to my bed, ration them out like my last salvation, one little tab per night. Melatonin, serotonin, diphenhydramine. Sleep. Relief.

There’s an unspoken knowledge in the way that Michael and Mina look at me when they think I don’t notice, but they don’t say anything. And if no one says anything, then there’s not a problem. I grind this logic into my own head and use it as a crutch to keep myself upright.

“You know what would fix how uptight you are?” my brother starts up over breakfast on the Friday before graduation.

“Hmm.” The final soccer game of the season was last night, and the sleeping meds haven’t worn off enough that I’m awake to the point of having an articulate conversation.

“I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. You need to get laid.”

I choke on a piece of bacon. “Mick!”

“Just callin’ it like I see it, man,” he shrugs, pointing his fork at me accusingly. “ _You_ have been a studious little monk for your entire high school career. No wonder you’re seeing things and you can’t sleep at night. You’re pent up. If somebody touched your butt you’d probably blast off through the ceiling.”

“We’re not having this conversation,” I groan.

“And I’m just saying, it’s not like you couldn’t do it, if you wanted to, that is. You and I were both, like… genetically engineered to be hot. And if it’s the social aspect of getting ass that’s stopping you, you’ve got the greatest mentor in the world sitting right here. I’m a professional at getting ass.”

“Mick, please.”

“I am the Booty Conquistador.”

Mina’s mom honks her horn in the driveway, here to pick me up for school since Dad still hasn’t gotten my car into the shop. I whisper, “Oh thank _God_ ,” and dive out of my chair before Michael can press the subject into more uncomfortable territory, which may or may not be impossible.

He throws his head back and laughs, ink-covered arms stretching up over his head as he leans his chair back on its two rear legs. “Dude, college is gonna eat you alive with as blushy and sheltered as you are.”

“How would you know?” I deadpan. “You never went to college. You decided to sell tacky feed-flash jewelry and band merch to angsty middle-schoolers instead.”

“Hahaha, fuck you.” Scowling, Mick lets his chair sink back to the floor with a dull thud. “I’ll remember that when I’m famous and you’re sitting in a cubicle somewhere.”

“Tell me the tracklist for your debut album later; I’m gonna be late for school.” My backpack is considerably lighter than usual, all my soccer stuff put away in my closet and no change of clothes. Just the school-issued e-reader that I have to turn back in next Wednesday when finals are over and graduation practices start, rattling lightly against my back when I shrug one worn strap over my shoulder.

Michael acts like he’s going to drop it there, shrugging and going back to looking at whatever’s flashing across his eyescreen. For a moment, I think about sitting back down and talking to him, actually _talking_ to him instead of the weird vaguely-inappropriate-mostly-inconsequential small talk thing that we do in between major crises and times when we actually need a support network. He knows about the sleeping pills, the tension I carry around at the top of my spine that’s been crawling in a slow ache down my back for weeks, but he won’t ask about them until he’s invited to. It’s how we work. You carry your own burden until you either ask for help or fall flat on your face, at which point your brother steps in to haul you back to your feet and make fun of you while he helps you across the finish line. It’s a good system.

“Hey, Mick.”

“Yeah?”

“I…” Mina’s mom honks her horn again. I can’t do this right now.

The only way I’ve made it this far is by learning how to compartmentalize, figuring out who I have to be and when I have to be it. There’s a time and a place for Marco the Son, Marco the Soccer Player, Marco the Drama Club Vice President.

Marco the Student doesn’t have time for Marco the Brother’s problems.

“I’m gonna need a ride home from rehearsal tonight,” I tell him, swallowing the lump in my throat.

He frowns for a second, powering down his eyescreen, but he doesn’t call me on what he knows I meant to say. Our system is a good one. Michael won’t swoop in while I’m still standing on my own two feet. We’re each other’s safety nets, not each other’s crutches.

“If Dad doesn’t get your car fixed soon I’m gonna go out in the driveway and do it myself, man,” he snorts, flicking the screen back on, some vid-snap flicking over his irises like a moving cataract. “I’ll be in the parking lot behind the theater at six.”

I nod and try to smile. It doesn’t quite come out right, but Mick has the decency to not call me on it.

Mina, however, doesn’t possess the same sense of mercy.

“You look like crap,” she says around a mouthful of a massive blueberry muffin when I pile in the back of the van.

“Love you too, Mina.”

“Just sayin’.” Mina waves the half-eaten muffin in my direction, but I shake my head and try to find something to focus on so I can ignore the feeling of my grip already slipping at seven in the morning. Little things. The tasks required of my role. Smile, be polite, thank Mrs. Carolina for driving me. Ask Mina if she’s ready for the Calc final, joke that with enough makeup and good wigs I could probably take her Spanish test in exchange for her doing math for me. Nod along to whatever conversation comes after that. It’s like filling in bullet-points on a list.

Act normal. Check. Continue functioning. Check. Breathe in. Breathe out. Do not scream. Do not give into the pressing panic that feels like it’s eating you from the inside. Check check check.

I wonder if this is what real life is, constantly existing a breath away from breaking down because there’s no one there to tell you what to be. Mina drops her muffin at a stoplight, and it hovers in the air a little too long to be scientifically possible, the arc of it falling back into her hand not quite natural. Ignore it.

Check.

The traffic snarl in front of the school is ridiculous, something I’m not used to dealing with since I usually drive myself and park in the student lot. We end up moving twenty feet in ten minutes before Mina lets out an irritated huff and grabs her backpack, chipmunk-ing the last of her muffin in her cheeks and flinging the door of the van open. “Bye Mom!”

“Mina!” her mother yells after her, too late to stop her daughter from weaving through four lanes of morning Las Vegas traffic and stomping off across Palo Verde’s desertscaped front lawn, dark pigtails waving behind her like twin battle banners.

“Thanks, Mrs. Carolina,” I laugh, the sound stiff, wondering if it’s possible to have acid reflux at eighteen as I swallow the nervous burn in my throat and hop out the open door after Mina. A chorus of angry car horns screams in my ears, hurrying me through a little wave and a frenzied sprint across the road. Mina’s halfway across the lawn by the time I catch up to her, poking at her Bangle to do a last minute feed check before we head for our lockers. “So were you looking to get mowed down by a car today, or...?”

“Bring it on, dude. Let someone hit me and pay my college tuition in settlement money.” She says it in that flat, acerbic tone she uses when she’s joking, but I can see the serious undertone in the way her head jerks back towards the highway for a moment before she clicks her Bangle off and starts up the stairs outside the main entrance two at a time.

Mina’s family has never been dirt poor, but they’ve never had financial wiggle room either, even more strapped for cash than my folks with their designer baby debt and meticulously monitored bank accounts. The Carolinas live in one of the older, smaller houses in our ritzy neighborhood, both parents drive old cars, and Mina claims to like thrift shopping for the sake of uniqueness even though we both know that’s not the real reason. Things were a little better when we were little kids, three or four years old, but her dad’s six-year battle with thyroid cancer that just wouldn’t stay dead left a heap of medical bills to soak up every spare penny for the foreseeable future. Mina’s college fund went to experimental chemo back in middle school. Even staying in town and going to UNLV next year, she’s looking at crippling amounts of student debt and no help paying it off. Maybe the stress is making me too wound up to take a joke, but there’s still a feeling like a sigh of relief when I herd Mina through the front door with an arm around her shoulders, safe and sound.

Maybe she looks out for me because I’m ‘too nice to look out for myself,’ but my end of the bargain has always been keeping her from doing something stupid on impulse. We have a system. This is why I can’t shake the terror that’s wrapped up in a plane ticket to Indiana at the end of the summer. Mina, Michael, all these people in my life that I’ve spent years living in symbiosis with, I don’t know what to do without them. I don’t know who I am without them. When you strip away Mina’s Marco, Michael’s Marco, Everyone Else’s Marco, what’s left? A ball of nerves and uncertainty that can’t give a definite answer to save his life and carries the inconvenient habit of thwarting the laws of physics on occasion.

In other words, not too goddamn much.

Mina’s unusually quiet through our morning trip to our lockers and all of first period, staring down at the worksheet on her e-reader and chewing on her stylus until the plastic cracks. She and I don’t operate on the same non-intervention policy that I have with Mick, so I lean over during a group activity when we’re supposed to be reading through scripts of Spanish conversations and ask her, “Are you okay? You seem glitchy.”

“Yeah, nothing major,” she waves me off, braiding one of her pigtails. Old nervous habit. “Sam’s just being an ass again; we had a fight last night and I’m gonna have to deal with him in Physics later.”

“Mina--”

“When am I gonna break up with him, I know.” Her eyes narrow to dark slits behind her glasses, knuckles white where her hands ball up in the fabric of her secondhand skirt. “You’re not exactly the best source for romantic advice, Marco.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Marco, Mina, _necesitan ayuda?_ ” Our teacher gives us an eagle-eyed stare from across the room, a seemingly innocent inquiry of whether we need help translating loud and clear as _shut up and do your work before I slam-dunk you into detention._

I give her the brightest smile I can, at least trying to be sincere. _“No, Señora Brzenska, lo estamos haciendo bien. Sólo estoy ayudando a Mina con estos verbos.”_

If she’s got half the intuition I think she does, she probably catches the drift. _Listen, lady, I’m taking this class for the easy A. I’ve dealt with eighteen years of my mother screaming in Spanish when she’s angry and wielding_ la chancla _with a deadly accuracy that strikes fear into the hearts of grown men. One loaded question en español from the whitest woman this side of Scandinavia literally does not scare me._

She backs off after that, and I take the opportunity to turn back to Mina, who’s chewing on her stylus again. “What do you mean, I’m not the best source for romantic advice?”

“Your longest relationship was a torrid two-week love affair with Hitch in the third grade, and you broke up with her when she wanted to kiss you,” says Mina, scooping up her stuff when the bell rings and trying to beat the rush into the hallway. “So pardon me for taking your counsel with a grain of salt.”

“It doesn’t take a certified couples’ counselor to know that your boyfriend’s a douche.”

“ _I_ know that my boyfriend’s a douche, Marco. Sometimes we love people in spite of their douchebaggery. It’s part of the human condition. How have you managed to live with Mick your whole life?”

“My brother has never been as rude to you as Sam is,” I protest.

Mina stops dead in the middle of the hallway and side-eyes me so hard that I almost sway on my feet. “Your brother once told me that my aesthetic is ‘future crazy cat lady’.”

“Insults are how Michael shows affection.” All I can do is shrug. I won’t deny what Mina’s alleging, mostly because it sounds like something Mick would say. “Just this morning he was calling me a pent-up virgin.”

“You _are_ a pent-up virgin.”

“And maybe you’re a future crazy cat lady.” Mina smacks me in the arm with her backpack. I manage to cringe away from the next blow, ducking around in front of her and raising my hands in surrender. “And my point was going to be that you’re also not _dating_ my brother - thank God - and that you deserve someone who will be nice to you. Is that really such an outrageous request?”

She just lets out a sad little laugh in response, wraps an arm around my waist and curls into my side as we travel in the tide of people pressing down the hall towards our lockers. “You’ve got a lot to learn about love, grasshopper.”

“Oh my God, shut up, you’re seventeen.”

“And that’s old enough to know that love’s not always nice,” says Mina, reaching into her locker to grab the charger for her e-reader and a half-empty bottle of water from the mess inside. “In fact, it gets pretty nasty. You’re not missing out on much, man. Relationships are weird.”

I roll my eyes and dart a hand into Mina’s locker before she slams it shut, digging around for a snack but only getting one granola bar of a questionable age for my effort. “Were you always this jaded?”

“That’s me, providing your daily dose of cynicism and witty one-liners.”

I’m starting to sink into my role, the panic from this morning having no place to fit in with who I have to be here and now. When I get out of school and go home, stare up at my ceiling in the middle of the night, it will come back. But for now, it’s easy to laugh as I say goodbye to Mina and head off to Calculus, easy to forget flying cats and weeks of impossible feats as I sit and sweat my way through the final, turning the thing in with the high hopes of scraping a passing grade. By the time the bell at the end of second period rings, the tension coiled up in my gut is starting to rest easy.

The hallway outside my Calc classroom is a bottleneck from the cafeteria into the fine arts wing, which means it’s always packed. Mina has History a little further down the hall, grabs onto my backpack as an anchor when I pass and uses it to haul herself out into the crush of people beside me. “So! Ready to build some sets?”

I groan, but it’s lost in the rabble of sound that bounces off the cinderblock walls. We have Theater next period, which means I’ll be helping to build the set that I’m going to be rehearsing on tonight. Maybe I won’t even need the sleeping pills when I get home. I’ll be so exhausted that my anxiety won’t have time to catch me before I’m unconscious.

We hover at the mouth of the fine arts wing, waiting for the crowded hall to thin out a little before trying to fight against the current to make it to our Theater classroom, flattened against the wall with twin expressions of exasperation on our faces. Palo Verde’s always been overcrowded because of the amount of families that elect to live in the suburban wholesomeness of Summerlin instead of Actual Vegas, which makes for unpleasant hours crammed in with a ton of other kids and narrow hallways that are unnavigable between classes.

A head of blonde hair pokes over most of the others down at the end of the wing, an earnest smile and a friendly wave in my direction that I return while trying to keep my face from going bright red.

“Speaking of love advice, half the school’s got bets on when you’re gonna ask Thomas Wagner out,” Mina hums, examining the chewed stubs of her nails.

I trip over my own feet and faceplant into a wall. Smooth. “What?! No!”

“Oh, come on, you think he’s cute.”

“That’s irrelevant--”

“And I have it from a reliable source that he’s into you too.”

I stop mid-protest, looking back and forth between Mina beside me and Thomas’ slow progress up the hall. “Really?”

Mina just fixes me with this knowing, shit-eating grin.

“What’s your reliable source?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “I asked him.”

_“Mina!”_

“Got the job done, didn’t I?” I am going to die. I am going to melt into a gross puddle of shame on the floor and be trampled by the overpriced neon-colored sneakers of my classmates. This is it. This is the end. Mina takes my impending demise lightly, scrolling through the feed screen on her Bangle and barely sparing me a glance. “It’s not going to kill you to go on a date.”

“I can’t!” I wail, burying my face in my hands.

Mina rolls her eyes. “Why not? You’ve been giving him goo-goo eyes since like… sophomore year.”

There’s a list. A very carefully-crafted list that I’ve made in preparation of this exact situation, counting off on my fingers as I start to inform Mina of all the shortcomings of her well-intentioned mistake. “We’re on the soccer team together, fraternization would make it weird--”

“Your final soccer season ended last week.”

“I don’t want to deal with my parents--”

“Marco. Seriously?” She arches an eyebrow at me. “Your older brother is a freewheeling pansexual with more tattoos than a carnival sideshow who only emerges from your parents’ basement when he’s done rehearsing with his band. You’re not becoming the black sheep of your family any time soon.”

She has a point, so I abandon that logic and move onto the next justification. “Any interest in me is probably vague at best--”

“He was gonna ask you to prom but backed off when he found out you were taking Hitch,” says Mina, flicking over to another app with a flourish.

“We’re graduating in a week.” I’m grasping at straws now, dreading the hallway thinning out and Thomas getting to where Mina and I are standing faster. “And he’s going to UNLV with you next year; it’d be ridiculous to start something when I’m going to Indiana in three months.”

“I said to go on a date with him, not marry him.” Mina’s hand closes in a vice grip around my arm, and she hauls me off into the hall.

“Mina. Mina, what are you doing?”

She tugs at me a little harder, her face set in determination. “I’m throwin’ you out of the nest, baby bird. Time to fly.”

“Or fall and break my neck!”

“Better start flapping, then.”

“Mina, I swear to--” For a tiny girl hauling around a almost-six-foot Varsity soccer player, she shows a surprising amount of both strength and agility, swinging me around like a human shotput and flinging me up the hall so that I stumble with perfect, terrible precision into Thomas Wagner.

I’m going to kill her. If I survive this, I’m going to kill her.

“Woah, easy!” My balance thrown off, I’m on a one-way collision course with the floor when Thomas grabs my arm and pulls me back upright, eyes widened in surprise. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah, I just…” I turn around to point the finger of accusation at Mina, but somewhere in the past few seconds, she’s disappeared. “I uh… hi.”

“Hey,” he grins. “You, uh… always go for a demolition derby in between classes?”

“Maybe I should have played football.” The laugh I force out sounds completely deranged. Oh God, he probably thinks I’m a future serial killer or something.

“Coach would’ve been pissed if you’d ditched soccer to go get concussions and more substantial college scholarships.” The hallway traffic’s finally thinning out, but Thomas doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get away from me, which counts as some sort of victory. “You playing for Purdue next year?”

“Nah. My soccer career’s pretty much dead.”

“Ah, that’s too bad. Everyone figured you’d play in college. You could’ve been captain this year if you’d wanted.”

I hadn’t wanted to, though. I can only function in a situation where someone’s telling me what to do. The idea of being put in a place where I’d be responsible for dictating other people’s lives made me uncomfortable at best, paralyzed with panic at worst. I’d turned down Coach’s offer after a week of sleeping on it, Thomas had gotten the captain’s spot, and the rest is a long and embarrassing history that apparently culminates with me feeling like the most awkward blob of a human on the planet, standing in the hall with my eyes locked on my shoes.

“I was just, uh. Going to Theater,” I tell him. Why does he care? He doesn’t care. I wonder if I could climb into a locker to escape. Mina has gone to the very top of my shit-list for this.

He tilts his head to the side, giving me an uncertain smile. “Oh, cool. I’m headed to Chemistry.”

“Yeah I.... I love Chemistry.” Because that’s relevant.

“You were saying in the locker room the other day that you hated Chemistry.”

Maybe if I tried, _really_ tried, I could call upon whatever freak powers I’ve been telling myself I don’t have and use them to fling myself through the wall. “Oh, yeah, I do. That was, uh. Sarcasm. Right there. What I was saying.”

Thomas laughs, and it sounds genuine, a hand coming up to ruffle the back of his hair as he looks up the hallway behind him and says, “Okay? Well, I don’t wanna be late, so I’d better go…”

“Yeah!” Please. Please go to class and leave me alone to drown in my own embarrassment. “Yeah, sorry about the… thing. Wouldn’t want you to be late.”

He turns around and starts walking away, and I don’t know why I feel so sad. Maybe all the jokes from Michael and the exasperation from Mina have been tied to something deeper, some greater realization that they came to long before I did. I’ve never been much for the business of self-satisfaction. Standing there in the ugly orange-and-brown-painted cinderblock hallway, I try to think of the last time I did something because _I_ wanted to do it.

I can’t. I can’t remember. Maybe it’s time I did something about that.

“Hey, Thomas!”

He turns around two steps shy of the corner, thumbs hooked around his backpack straps. “Yeah?”

“Would you, uh.” I feel like there’s a wad of cotton lodged in my throat. “Maybe, sort of, want to… what I’m trying to say is…”

“Yes.”

“What.”

Thomas shrugs, a big, lopsided smile stretching endearingly at the corners of his mouth. “Yes, I think we should go out sometime. Mina talked to me.”

I figure that I need to say something to make me look less pitiable than exactly what I am, a guy who needs Mina Carolina to land him a date, and reply with a suave, “Oh.”

Nailed it.

He sort of shifts his weight back and forth, still smiling, and before I know it I’m sporting a dopey grin to echo him. “I mean, if you’re not busy tonight…”

“I’ve got rehearsal, but it lets out at six.”

“Works for me,” Thomas nods, not even bothering to check his eyescreen to see if he’s got something planned. It takes more willpower than it should for me to not throw a victorious fist in the air. “I mean, the Strip’s a mess now that all the tourists are coming in for the start of the season, but if you wanted to just come over to my place and play video games, I’d be down.”

I suck at video games. I don’t care. “That sounds awesome. I mean, I’ve got to check some things out first but…”

The bell rings, and we both jump. Thomas turns around and shoots a glance up the hall to where his Chemistry class is, walking backwards for a few steps as he finishes off the conversation. “Just shoot me a message, okay? I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah…” He’s already too far up the hallway to hear me.

It’s the smallest of victories, but I don’t feel bad for letting myself bask in it. A whole lifetime of not really knowing how to take myself off autopilot, a more recent few weeks of being terrified to jump the tracks for fear I end up living the plot of some bad cult classic sci-fi show, and a date to go over to Thomas Wagner’s house and play video games might as well be a one-way ticket to Shangri-Goddamn-La.

I walk through the stage door into the theater with a noticeable swagger in my step, cutting in front of Mina and flashing a self-satisfied smirk. “You will not _believe_ what just happened.”

She bumps me out of the way and goes back to painting trees on a canvas flat. “Judging by the look on your face, you didn’t pee your pants _or_ cry. Proud of you.”

I’m surprised that it actually takes five whole seconds of me being in the theater before Miss Langnar ambushes me with a power drill and instructions to help some of the other guys get flats mounted in place. She doesn’t mess around, especially not in the days before a show, and no one in the Theater department is suicidal enough to test her patience in the throes of tech week. I manage to snag a flat right behind where Mina is painting, though, shouting at her over the electric whine of the drill.

“Video games at his place tonight, apparently.” I’m not the best with power tools, and the brackets for the flat get screwed down a little unevenly, but they’re sound enough that I can put my weight against them without them toppling to the floor. “Think your mom can give me a ride? I don’t want Mick dropping me off for a date.”

“That’d be a potential train wreck,” says Mina, shuddering as she steps back to look at her shading. “Unfortunately, we’ve got to go get my little sister from ballet right after rehearsal lets out, and that’s on the other side of the Strip.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it, then.” I wave her off, trying to figure out how to cover up the hole where I punched through the canvas on my flat with a screw. “Thomas lives a few blocks from here. His parents hosted a couple of those big soccer team cookouts we do at the end of the season; I remember where it is. I can just walk.”

“Oh my God, just let Michael drive you.”

“My brother referred to himself as ‘the Booty Conquistador’ this morning. I’m not exposing Thomas to that.”

“Point taken,” Mina nods, and she doesn’t press the issue any further.

The rest of class goes by quickly. Mina paints, I work on my flats, a couple of the other kids get a ramp built that will become a hill after a coat of artificial moss and some styrofoam. Miss Langnar is having such a coronary over the projectors aimed at the backdrop glitching again that I actually snag a few seconds to duck backstage and send a message to Mick telling him to not bother with picking me up. He responds a minute later asking why. I sneak off again and lie to him, saying that I’m going out to dinner with Mina and Hitch at this new sushi place on the Strip. Michael takes it at face value, and I’m not too surprised, given the fact that he’ll take any excuse to not have to go somewhere that isn’t band practice or Taco Bell.

The bell rings, and the theater clears out in record time, everyone rushing to get to the cafeteria. The press of people and loud voices bouncing off the walls doesn’t sound like something I can deal with right now, and I’m not really that hungry, so I jump down off the newly-built ramp and ask, “Hey, Miss Langnar, is it cool if I work through lunch?”

“Just don’t paint that ramp,” she shrugs, checking something on her tablet and cross-referencing it with the set we’ve completed thus far. “You can stay in here and run your blocking to see if it works with the set. And Mina, if you want to stay too, Marco can always be your mock-up to help you run lighting cues.”

“Fine with me,” says Mina.

Miss Langnar disappears back across the hall to her office after that. I wander around until I hit center stage, and Mina clambers up the stairs at the back of the auditorium to get to the light rail. I can hear the groan of the ancient interface booting up all the way down here, the rig over my head coming to life with a rusty shriek. The theater hasn’t been updated since most of our parents went to school here, every dime of funding gone to sports teams. No wonder Miss Langnar looks like she’s constantly a breath away from tearing her hair out. Canvas flats that have been repainted more times than anyone can count, set pieces salvaged from other schools, a lighting rig that complains for an hour before anyone can use it… our entire infrastructure is on its last leg.

“Okay, Puck, get your butt in place for the start of Act Two!” Mina yells down from the rail, poking at the lightboard with an expression of growing frustration.

My senior show just _had_ to be Shakespeare. Four years putting blood, sweat, and tears into Drama Club and throwing every elective away for another theater class, and my big reward is standing center stage in tights and tacky latex elf ears. I've been salty about it ever since the show announcements for this semester went up, and my current stressed-out state of mind doesn't make it any better, a low stream of grumbles humming in my chest as I shuffle over to the top of the newly constructed hill-ramp.

"Kinda hard to run blocking with no fairy here," I shout back, squinting when the spotlight hits me right in the face.

"I'm just trying to get the controls on this rig working. I don’t need you to to win a Drama Desk Award; just walk around so I can get these cues programmed.”

“How now, spirit! whither wander you?” I mutter, shuffling down the ramp. The light in my face makes weird, colored spots dance in front of my eyes. “Blah, blah, blah. Christina’s supposed to be coming in from stage left.”

Mina prods at something on the lightboard, and the rig shifts with another metallic squeal, the whole structure shaking as the spotlight shifts to trace an invisible person’s progress across the stage. It stalls halfway, and Mina curses, slapping a hand down on the rail. “What the hell?!”

“I think it’s stuck,” I yell up to her, hopping off the ramp and going over to squint up at the light in question. “The track’s all rusted; it does that sometimes.”

“Nice analysis, Captain Obvious! How am I supposed to fix it?!”

“Try backing it up and then running it at about twenty-four down the x-axis.”

Mina purses her lips, and the rig scoots back a few feet, the pool of yellow light shimmering on the wet paint of the canvas flats. “Langnar said we’re not supposed to run it above twenty.”

“You have to give it a little more gas to get it over the rusty spots.” Something in the theater is creaking, but that’s nothing new. “I had to do it when I ran lights for _Newsies_ last fall. You’ll have to do it on manual override, but it should work. Run the cue again.”

The whole structure shudders as Mina punches the command into the lightboard, the light rattling down the rig back to the spot where it stalled before. It doesn’t stall this time.

This time, the rusted metal on the track beneath it snaps, and a three-hundred-pound spotlight goes into freefall directly above my head.

Mina screams. The lighting rig flickers and goes dead in a shower of sparks. The light drops in less than a second, and all I have time to do is throw my hands up over my head out of pure reflex and hope that I die instantly.

The impact doesn’t come.

I pry my eyes open, blink a few times in confusion. Look up. The light is hovering two feet above my head, bobbing up and down like a buoy riding out ocean waves. My skin tingles with the same feeling that haunts me whenever I try to sleep, spider-legs, unshed static, humming up my spine and through my teeth and sparking down under the beds of my fingernails.

“Oh my God,” Mina says, hanging over the light rail.

I take two steps back, drop my hands. The light crashes to the floor right where I’d been standing. The whole auditorium shakes with the impact.

“Oh my _God_.”

“I can explain.” A lie. A blatant lie, but it’s the only thing I can make myself say before Mina turns and _sprints_ down the stairs, running up to the edge of the stage and looking at the smoldering wreckage of the spotlight. Her eyes are wide and unblinking behind her glasses, mouth slack as her gaze moves from the light to me.

Taking a slow step back, she whispers, “Marco, what did you _do_?”

This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I see it in her eyes, in the tension of her shoulders, in the way she subconsciously puts distance between us. Fear. Mina’s afraid of me. I can’t blame her. For the past few weeks, I’ve been terrified of myself.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice level. I take a slow step towards her. She steps back again. “It’s this… it’s a thing. A thing that happens. I don’t know what it is or how it works.”

Mina’s breath shudders, tremors branching out all the way to the ends of her fingers as she sidesteps the debris in front of her and climbs up onto the stage. She walks in a slow circle around the fallen light, looking back up at me again. “This thing weighs two of you. And you made it just… float there. For a good five seconds. You _levitated_ it.”

“Well, I mean, realm of impossibility aside, I’m kind of glad I did? I’d be a little dead if I hadn’t.”

“How long has this been going on?” she chokes out, going pale.

I almost lie to her. It’d be easier to call this a recent development, would put her more at ease. But Mina and I have always had an ironclad policy of honesty, and I’ve been breaking it enough by keeping this a secret. “Remember when I came to school that one day all bugged out about the cat?”

Mina looks confused for a second, but her expression shifts to hurt when she finally remembers. “Marco, that was _weeks_ ago.”

“Yeah, well, it’s taken me a while to come to terms with it.” Not that I have. At all.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me if I had?”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. We stand there, Mina and I, breathing in the smoke that rises from the ruined equipment, and somehow I know that this is the beginning of the end. I’m not sure exactly what’s ending - our friendship, our mutual trust, any prayer of normalcy I had left - but the sinking feeling in my gut lets me know without question that something is coming to a close.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” I whisper.

“Okay,” says Mina, just as soft. “But, I mean… what are you gonna do? You said this has been happening for a while.”

Shrugging, I nudge at the fallen spotlight with my toe and avoid making eye contact. “I was sort of planning to ignore it.”

“And what, just hope it went away?”

“What other choice did I have?” And when have I ever been good at making choices? When have I ever been able to operate without someone else pulling the strings and guiding me around the rough patches? I’ve always told myself that the way I go through life is born of a visceral fear of disappointing people, but the far more selfish truth is that I’ve never wanted the burden of making my own calls. If something ever went wrong, I didn’t want to clean up the mess, didn’t want the fallout to be mine.

And now it is. I’ve got a big, impossible heap of it sparking dangerously at my feet. Even worse, I’ve dragged Mina into it. I don’t know which scares me more.

“You can’t just pretend that this - whatever _this_ is - doesn’t exist,” Mina says.

“Watch me,” I say.

I don’t want the fallout. So I step around it and walk out of the auditorium into the tide of kids streaming from the cafeteria in the wake of the lunch bell. Every step I take feels heavier, a roar in my head that’s deafening by the time I make it to my next class. I want to run back to Mina, to my parents, to _anyone_ who will tell me what to do so I don’t have to face the fact that I’m stuck on a sinking ship I have no idea how to steer.

I’ve heard the phrase “downward spiral” before. This is a nosedive.

The rest of the day passes on autopilot. I sit through the rest of my classes without actually _being_ there, preoccupied with the weird sense of impending doom that refuses to leave me alone. My Bangle buzzes on my wrist during last period, a message from Thomas asking if we're still on for tonight. Of course we are. The moment I start letting this madness affect the way I function is the moment I go down and never get back up.

I don't have the choice of letting this throw me off. Breaking down is not an option. Forget that it's already happening. Breathe in, breathe out, one foot in front of the other. Baby steps are better than crawling, and crawling is better than lying down and getting trampled.

Rehearsal starts ten minutes after the final bell. Tech week for shows is usually pretty fun despite Miss Langnar being more on the the edge of a mental breakdown than usual. Everyone laughs and messes around backstage, one of the parents always orders a couple of pizzas, and most nights the cast and crew ends up going out for dinner somewhere in Summerlin after we call it quits for the night. I used to look forward to tech week. Now the idea of going back to the auditorium makes me feel like my guts are dropping all the way to my shoes. I don't want to see Mina looking at me like something she should be frightened of again.

But whatever the past few hours of time has given her, she’s much calmer when I walk in than she was during lunch, standing on stage with a visibly more distraught Miss Langnar and jotting down notes on her tablet as they redesign light cues to work around the broken rig, which has since been moved backstage.

“I think they’re changing your blocking,” she tells me on her way back up to the light rail, clipping her stylus onto her shirt collar.

“Okay?” There are too many people around to talk about the situation frankly, so I settle for a loaded look and a hushed, “Are you all right?”

Mina snorts and sits down on an armrest at the end of the back row of chairs, playing with a strand of dark hair that’s come loose from its elastic. “Langnar ripped me a new asshole for running the rig above twenty - thanks for that great advice, by the way, you plebe - and I’m gonna have to stay here until midnight reprogramming the cues, but yeah, I’m peachy.”

My only response is a guilty little squirm, a quick glance to make sure that the coast is still clear before I mutter, “I meant about the other thing. I know you were freaked out.”

“Freaked out is an understatement,” she replies, voice flat. “But you said you wanted to ignore it. So here I am. Ignoring it.”

I’ve always known about Mina’s capacity to be cold. Hell, she’s been an outright blizzard to my brother since we were kids, flying insults and low blows part of whatever weird friendship-by-association that she and Mick have. I’ve seen her turn it on bullies, on unreasonable teachers, on Sam when he’s really stepped out of line. But it’s never been turned on me before, and the chill she leaves behind her when she turns and heads up to the light rail aches somewhere deep in my chest.

Whining about life’s little cruelties never did anything for anyone, but standing on stage and looking up at the twisted wreckage of the broken lighting rig, I have to bite back a scream. This isn’t fair. I never asked for any of this. All the universe had to give me was enough normal to make it to graduation, and even that was too much to hope for.

There’s something corrosive and awful pressing at the lining of my lungs and throat, but I swallow it down, play a role within a role within a role until I force myself to lose sight of Marco who’s terrified beyond words and step into Marco the Drama Club Vice President, Marco the Senior Lead, Miss Langnar’s Marco, Puck, anyone I can be that isn’t ready to crawl out of his own skin. It works.

I spend the last few minutes of rehearsal hanging out backstage with a junior named Deb, who’s playing Titania, talking about how her mom’s making all the costumes for the show and right now her living room looks like a fabric store threw up all over it. The idle conversation keeps me busy, keeps up appearances. Mina told me once that there are popular kids and then there are _popular kids_ , that I hadn’t clawed my way up the social ladder so much as easily ascended by virtue of thinking it was a good practice to just be nice to everyone, a concept that most people apparently can’t grasp. And there’s a measure of solace in the way people smile at me on their way out the door, ask if I’m coming along to go get Thai food with the rest of the cast and look genuinely disappointed when I tell them no.

But there’s a measure of sadness in the truth. These people love me, but each one of them loves a different version. The problem with being a human chameleon is that it’s hard to find someone who loves you for who you are when you’re not even sure what that is. I’ve been content with it for most of my life, but something about not even Mina being able to love Marco the Freak of Nature becomes a catalyst for me coming to a realization that I’ve been putting off for a long time.

My life? It’s a goddamn miserable disaster, and flying cats and levitating lighting rigs don’t have a thing to do with that.

I’m alone backstage shoving my stuff into my backpack when the curtain ruffles behind me, the lenses of Mina’s glasses flashing under the dim blue lights of the Act One lighting cue. She moves uncertainly, weight on the balls of her feet like she could run away at a moment’s notice if she needed to, drawing up beside me with her lips pressed into a thin line.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

I frown and ask her, “Sorry for what?”

Mina stammers for a second, and it’s weird, someone who could stare down a hurricane faltering in the face of the kid she swore to protect from playground bullies in kindergarten. “Just… everything, I guess. I was so busy glitching out over this that I didn’t realize that maybe it’s my fault.”

“I’m positive that this isn’t your fault, Mina,” I laugh, but there’s more weariness than humor in it.

“It’s my fault that you’ve been in this alone,” she presses on, shaking her head. “You felt like you couldn’t talk to me. I haven’t been there for you the way I needed to if that’s how you felt. And this whole thing is a mess, and I just… I’m really sorry, okay? I need you to know that. Just tell me that you know that.”

“Okay, okay, calm down.” She’s almost never this wound up about anything, which only contributes to my sense that something’s wrong. Still, seeing Mina upset triggers a knee-jerk reaction of wanting to fix it, and that desire overwhelms anything else bothering me as I reach out and squeeze her shoulder with one hand, shrugging my backpack on with the other. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You’re good. We’re good. I promise.”

Mina curls in on herself like something’s stabbed her in the chest, a moment of weakness that she covers by stiffening her spine and giving me a sharp nod.

“Anyway, I gotta go. I told Thomas I’d walk over after rehearsal. Don’t want to be late.”

“Yeah, you should head out.” Thinking the conversation’s over, I’m halfway through turning around to head for the door when Mina lunges forward, her arms wrapping tight around my waist. “I love you, okay?”

“Love you too,” I hum, hugging her back. “Hey, if you need a ride after you’re done programming, call Mick. He won’t want you walking home alone that late any more than I do.”

She just nods, looking weirdly like she’s about to cry when she steps back and walks out onstage to look up at the positions of lights on the rig.

Maybe it’s the stress and the sleep deprivation and everything else, but I swear I hear her say “I’m sorry” again before the stage door closes behind me.

Summerlin isn’t a cesspool of urban crime by any stretch of the imagination, but there are parts of it that get a little creepier at night. The streets surrounding Palo Verde are mostly lined with privacy hedges that easily become gnarled and overgrown. On occasion, tourists who are just drunk enough to be up to no good wander in from Vegas and cause mild amounts of mayhem. Living this close to a big city, you’re always taught not to walk alone at night, but the lessons sort of roll off your back when you’re a big-ish guy that takes part in Varsity athletics. Breathing the dry, dying heat of the night air makes me feel at ease for the first time all evening, the tension in my shoulders unwinding as I fire a message off to Thomas and pop my earbuds in, swiping through my Bangle to put my music on shuffle.

The traffic’s tame enough that I jaywalk across the usually-busy street out in front of the school, jogging over to the dry desertscaped lawns of Thomas’ neighborhood and trying to remember whether I have to turn on the third or fourth block down to get to his house. A lone van pulls out of the Palo Verde parking lot behind me, probably one of the maintenance guys going home.

The music and idle swiping through my Bangle distract me, give me something to focus on other than how disproportionately sad Mina had looked as I left, the weird feeling that’s been following me since lunch. My hands tingle again. I scratch at them until the skin is red and burning, refocus on the little things. Baby steps. Thomas’ house, video games, something I should be happy about.

The same van from Palo Verde is still following me.

Wait, what?

An uncomfortable little shiver running down my spine, I pop my earbuds out, wondering how I hadn’t realized it after I’ve been walking for what, three blocks? No distinctive marks, just a plain white van. Tinted windows. I slow down. So does the van.

_Shit._

“Vid-call Mina,” I mumble into my Bangle, heart starting to pound loudly and painfully against my ribs. She’s the person who’s geographically closest. I’ll call her, then I’ll call Mick, and then I’ll make a mad dash for Thomas’ house and hope I don’t end up a sad statistic of another urban Latino kid going missing that gets a passing mention on the local news.

The vid-call interface rings. And rings. And rings.

She’s not picking up, but her Bangle’s not dead. Maybe she’s got it on silent. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I start walking faster, jabbing out of Mina’s call and pulling up a voice-call under Michael’s name. It doesn’t even ring through. A second passes, and a window on my Bangle screen pops up with the words ‘NO SERVICE’ flashing in red.

That’s all the indicator I need to start running.

Some part of me knows that years of soccer still aren’t any match for a car, but I take off at a sprint anyway, mind too clouded to think to run for Thomas’ house anymore. My best bet is getting somewhere public where people can see me, disappearing into a crowd. There’s a mini-mall about a half-mile down the road, but I can’t remember my way out of the twisting maze of cul-de-sacs. Instinct takes over, and I end up zig-zagging like a rabbit running from some larger predator, not even looking behind me to see if the van’s keeping pace.

I’m starting to think I have a chance when an arm darts out of some bushes and clotheslines me.

I hit the pavement hard, the air knocked from my lungs, and before I have the time to roll over and scramble to my feet, the van pulls up beside me.The arm from the bushes grows into a tall silhouette in camouflage fatigues (Uniform? Army?), but I don’t have time to see more than that before there’s weight on my back keeping me down and a sharp jab in the side of my neck.

(Needle? Clouds? Why am I so tired?)

I flail weakly against the hands that haul me into the back of the van, but whatever’s hit my bloodstream is too strong, pressing down on my consciousness like an oppressive weight.

“No…” I mutter, squinting up at the van’s ceiling. Stay awake. Stay awake. It’s the only way to save yourself.

A figure swims into focus, the same uniform that jumped out of the bushes at me, cropped blonde hair and a pretty face, name tag that reads _N...Na...something._

“Just go to sleep, honey,” she says, a smooth palm brushing across my cheek. Mom used to do that when I had nightmares. “Don’t fight it. Just sleep.”

“But I had a date,” I slur out, and then everything goes black. And I sleep.

I’ve always been good at doing what I’m told to do.


	4. Prayers To Broken Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is the way the world ends  
> this is the way the world ends  
> this is the way the world ends  
> not with a bang but a whimper
> 
> _t.s. elliot, "the hollow men"

I wake up to a throbbing headache and the smell of antiseptic on metal, a windowless white room with too-bright lights and the muted hum of machinery in the distance.

And to a boy I’ve never seen before perched on the end of the hospital bed I’ve been sleeping in.

The confusion and panic hits all at once, and I suck in a ragged breath, ready to scream for all I’m worth. The boy reaches down with a quick dart of his arm, plants a hand over my mouth, and arches an eyebrow at me. “Please don’t. It’ll just make this whole thing more unpleasant for everyone involved.”

I blink. Breathe. Take the time to process my surroundings and the only other living thing in them. He’s lanky almost to the point of atrophy, long arms skeleton-thin. Skin lighter than it _should_ be, if that even makes sense, the undertones of a dark complexion washed out like they haven’t seen the sun in months, in years. Angular, gaunt bone structure, whiskey-colored eyes made darker by the deep, sleepless shadows hanging beneath them, messy blondish hair the color of wet sand.

A scowl trained on me that could probably drop a bull elephant at twenty paces.

“You done?” he asks in a voice that was made for shouting but trained for whispers, gravelly baritone scraping over the words. I nod. He removes his hand and sits back strangely, an awkward crouch with feet planted on the mattress and long, skinny legs tucked up to his chest. Taking up less space. He fixes me with a look caught somewhere between pity and exhaustion and says, “You’ve got questions.”

“What happened?” I croak before the effort of speaking sends me into a coughing fit. Safe to assume I’ve been out for at least a day. There’s an IV sticking out of my arm, but those fluids won’t do anything for a dry throat.

He snorts, giving me a skeptical look. “You really don’t know?”

“I was walking to Thomas’ house…”

“And they grabbed you, yeah. Needle in the neck, creepy van, lots of military lingo. That’s usually how they do it.”

It starts to come back the more I think about it, hazy memories that slip through my mind, amorphous and hard to catch. Running. Pain. Someone telling me to sleep.

“But why? Where am I?” Whatever’s in my system is sluggish in working its way out, fogging up my brain like steam on a window. There are no windows. Why are there no windows?

“Shit, are you still that messed up?” My visitor (monitor? nurse?) asks, looking up at something at the top of my IV drip before leaning down and peering into my eyes. He pauses for a moment, frowns, and then sits back up, brushing the wrinkles out of a thin gray cotton shirt that matches his pants. It takes me a few seconds to realize that I’m wearing the same thing. Uniforms? They’re reasonably comfortable, although the light fabric and the fact that the shirts don’t have sleeves don’t go well with the chilly, filtered air in the room. The stiff mandarin collar of mine is still buttoned up around my neck, but the other boy has his popped open, the loose fabric wrinkling the embroidered emblem over his heart, some sort of weird design in a circle with two crossed swords behind it.

He moves again before I have the chance to get a better look at it, prodding at the IV drip and letting out an irritated huff. “They must have OD’ed you on the sedative since they didn’t have a complete report; didn’t know how well you’d stand up to it. Lemme do a cognitive eval real quick. You know your name, Freckles?”

“Marco,” I mutter, trying to sit up before he pushes me back down.

“You know what year it is?”

“2042. Why am I—”

“You don’t get to ask questions until I’m done asking them,” he snaps, pressing two spindly fingers to the inside of my wrist, checking my pulse. “Five times three?”

“Fifteen!” Swatting him away, I push myself up into a sitting position, gritting my teeth against the head rush. “Look, whatever they drugged me with didn’t fry my brain, so would you just _tell_ me who you are and where I am and what I’m doing here?”

A long silence follows, the two of us glowering at each other, seeing who will cave first.

“I’m Jean,” he says. I get the feeling that he’s letting me win. “You’re in Facility 4B, Level 3, in the infirmary. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news since you apparently don’t know shit, but congratulations. You’re Gifted.”

_Gifted._

Michael had laughed, said it like it was some sort of joke, and I’d laughed with him. A stupid lie told at slumber parties and summer camp to freak your friends out. Kids with weird powers who just disappear one day. I look down at my hands, remember what they’re capable of.

My stomach turns, bile painting itself thick along the backs of my teeth. “That’s impossible.”

Jean just laughs, a raspy, tired sound. “It’s really not.”

“Yes it is!” I protest, clinging to the last slipping pieces of the world I knew with ragged, bloody fingernails.

It has to be impossible. Being a lone freak of nature is something I could have handled, eventually. It was another role I could have balanced, a new facet that I could have worked into my life, eventually. But something bigger? I could barely keep my head above water juggling Marco the Son, Marco the Student, Marco the Best Friend.

I don’t know how to be Marco the Gifted. I _can't_.

“The Gifted aren’t real.” If I keep saying it, maybe that will make it true. Maybe that will make all of this a horrible dream and I’ll wake up at home, strung out on Mom’s sleeping pills and dealing with a world of weird that’ll seem manageable compared to all of this. “They’re just an urban legend.”

Apparently done with his effort to hold my hand through it, Jean hops up from my bed, a sort of grace in his movements that’s out of place in someone as gangly as he is. He looks at the opposite wall for a moment, reaches out a hand wrapped in a heavy-duty black fingerless glove, some sort of padding on the palm. Nodding like he’s found the answer he was looking for, he places one finger against the painted metal wall.

And the whole thing buckles from where he’s standing all the way to the door. Shelves break. Containers of medical supplies crash to the floor. The wall bows outwards like it’s been hit by a train, the groan of the displaced metal making my teeth hurt. Jean’s hand looks almost blurred for a second when he pulls it back, fuzzy around the edges, like watching the bristles move on an electric toothbrush. He stares at his fingers for a moment until they still and go back to normal.

“So exactly what part of the urban legend is that?” he deadpans. Bored. He might as well be discussing the weather.

Dust shaken loose from the wall’s collapse settles in my hair. I’m at least with it enough to know that it’s a rhetorical question.

“They tell me you’re telekinetic,” he hums, sitting back on my bed with a casual air that doesn’t match the fact that he had to step over broken jars and wood splinters to get there. “No wonder they wanted you so bad; late bloomer with that kind of Gift. You could’ve destroyed an entire city. Now they can teach you how to destroy the cities you’re told to destroy.”

“They?” I remember something from being taken. Uniforms. Familiar.

“They.” Jean looks at me like I’m an idiot for not knowing what he’s talking about. “The higher ups. Our handlers. The government, apparently, if you’re trying to figure out who’s all the way up at the top of this pyramid of crazy. Anyway, don’t go trying to use your Gift just yet. With as peaky as you still are and no training, you’ll probably burn out, and then it’ll be my ass.”

The government. I’m part of some ridiculous Orwellian scheme. I feel like I’m going to pass out. To combat the vertigo and the sinking, sick feeling in my stomach, I swallow hard and focus on anything else, looking over at Jean and asking, “Burn out?”

“If you overuse your powers, your body takes the toll,” he explains, the singsong lull of his voice telling me that this is something that’s been drilled into his head a thousand times. “You have to work to get stronger, to push your limits further, but if you cross the line, it’s not fun. If you really overdo it, you can die. People have died. Apparently. I’ve never seen it happen, but I can tell you firsthand that burnout’s a bitch, so do yourself a favor and save the spoon bending for someone who gives a shit.”

He’s got no reason to lie to me about that, so I decide to take his word for it. “Probably part of the reason they dosed me up so much, right? So I couldn’t escape?”

“It’s for your own good,” says Jean, but there’s a sour look on his face as he turns and looks up at a little plastic fixture on the other side of the room - a camera. “There are a few simple rules for being Gifted. I’ve been here the longest out of anyone, so apparently that makes it my job to teach you these simple rules and be your tour guide. Think you can stand?”

I nod, and he rolls his eyes again for whatever reason, getting up and crossing over to the side of the room he didn’t demolish. There are other shelves there, cabinets where he snaps on a pair of exam gloves and grabs a wad of gauze and medical tape. He walks back over to me, grabbing my arm with almost mechanical precision and squinting down at my IV. “This’ll sting a little.”

“Are you really qualified to - ow!”

There’s a gauze pad pressed to my arm before I can even finish the question, the IV tube dangling down to the floor. Jean smirks, ripping a piece of medical tape off between his teeth. “Triage training. Everyone has to do it. I flunked the section on bedside manner, though.”

If he hears me muttering about how that’s not hard to believe, he doesn’t say anything, swiping a badge on his shirt collar across a sensor beside the door. It slides back with a mechanical whoosh, a rush of cold air spilling in from the hallway. Jean walks out into the corridor, waiting for me to get to my unsteady feet and tiptoe my way around the debris from his demonstration, the metal floor frigid against my bare toes. The hallway is as white and sterile as the infirmary, nothing but the hiss of filtered air through vents and the hum of harsh fluorescent lights overhead. Still no windows.

“We’re underground,” Jean explains, and I wonder if mind reading is another Gift of his as he grabs me by the bicep and hauls me down the hallway, not even giving me the chance to get oriented to my surroundings. “Like, _way_ underground. This facility is built with security that makes everything you’ve ever heard of look like a joke. Three circular levels of steel and concrete and whatever the hell else. We live on Level Three. Training center’s up on Two. We’re not allowed on Level One, but they tell us it’s all administrative stuff up there anyway.”

“Why is security so tight?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

He snorts out a laugh. “We’re the ultimate weapon, man. They keep us down here so the enemy can’t get in.”

“Or so we can’t get out.”

Jean’s hand tightens so hard around my arm that I can already feel it bruising, a big, toothy, _terrifying_ smile stretching across his face as he looks over at me. “Don’t be ridiculous, Marco. First Simple Rule of Being Gifted: Everything about the life you live here is for your own good. You’re a precious commodity, but also a potential danger if left untrained. You being here is a good thing.”

He doesn’t mean it. I can hear it in every syllable. But the tense way he’s holding himself says that we’re being watched, so I nod and try to look like I understand, following him down the hall and listening to him explain where everything is on Level Three. The level runs in a circle. Clockwise from the infirmary is the dining room, then the rec room, which looks about as fun as lying on a bed of nails, uncomfortable-looking couches and a card-swipe lock to get in. The sleeping quarters are further around the circle. Jean shows me the bathroom at the end of the hall and then takes me to a tiny room that’s apparently mine now. The first windows I’ve seen in the place. Every room has them, massive panes of glass looking out into the hallway. No privacy. There’s not even much to look in on, a twin-sized bed with standard-issue blankets and a dresser full of the same gray uniforms as I’m wearing now.

“You’ll get specialized equipment after they put you through your paces and figure out what you need,” Jean explains, holding up a gloved hand in reference. “I have these for traction and shock absorption. If you couldn’t tell, my Gift is a heaping load of seismic bullshit. You’ll get an assessment soon and then—”

“Woah, is he up?” A blur comes shooting down the hallway, stopping right in front of me and solidifying into another kid in a gray uniform. He’s shorter than Jean, his frame wiry but strong, copper-skinned with a mop of dark hair that brushes his shoulders, falling over the goggles strapped over bright green eyes. Even standing in one place, he shifts his weight back and forth continually, looking like he’s ready to take off at any second. With a big, earnest grin, he yanks the goggles up so that they rest on the top of his head, hair sticking out wildly around them. “I heard them saying that the new guy’d be up today. Krista tried to phase and sneak down to get a look, but they caught her before she got to the elevator. Smith was _pissed_ , man, I thought Krista was gonna start bawling—”

“Eren Jaeger,” Jean talks over him, voice flat. “Tenth-year resident. His Gift is speed, which you see obviously extends to his oversized mouth.”

 _"Yáadilá tl'a'iiyahii!”_ Eren snaps, irritation painting the fluid tones of some language I’ve never heard before when he smacks Jean on the arm. “We’ve got company, asshole.”

“Yeah, and you’re getting up in his face. How did you even get down here?”

“I was smart about scoping out New Guy, unlike Krista,” he shrugs, a smirk curling at his lips. “Faked a burnout, got sent down here to rest.”

Jean’s expression twitches into something concerned for a fleeting moment, but he covers it with a glare. “If they find out, your ass’ll be grass and Erwin’ll be the lawnmower.”

“Good thing they won’t find out, then,” says Eren, expending the last of his attention on Jean before he reaches out and punches my shoulder, just a tap. “Hey, you’re Marco, right? Dude, when they told us they hauled in a telekinetic we all flipped our shit. There hasn’t been one since the very first Gifted, you know. You’re like a rare collector’s item or something.”

“Back off already, he’s got enough mental overload as-is,” Jean grumbles, reaching over and snapping Eren’s goggles hard against his forehead. “Go lay down and act like you’re in pain before they send someone down to check on you. You get caught and they’ll run you so hard that you won’t be able to move for a week.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eren scoffs, turning on his heel and ambling back down the hallway. “Better watch it, _shínaaí_ , your inner softie comes out when you get all Mama Bear like that.”

Jean taps his foot, and a visible wave ripples out across the floor, tripping Eren up to the point that he falls flat on his face.

“Ow! Son of a _bitch!”_

“Go to bed, Eren,” Jean calls over his shoulder, leading me back out into the hallway.

I follow him wordlessly for a while, but my curiosity gets the best of me as we’re standing outside an ominous set of brushed-metal elevator doors. “Why’s it such a big deal that he came down here?”

“Because he lied to do it.” It’s hard to spot, but the worry is still etched into Jean’s face, his eyes flicking back towards the sleeping quarters every few seconds. “Second Simple Rule of Being Gifted, Marco. Don’t try anything stupid. Eren excels at breaking that rule.”

“Yeah, he does kinda seem like a, um… loose cannon,” I offer, stepping onto the elevator after Jean when it arrives with a crisp ding and the soundless opening of the doors. “He said something to you back there; I couldn’t tell what language…”

“He was calling me a butthead,” Jean laughs, and it actually sounds earnest this time, a small spark of fondness that hasn’t been there until now. “In Navajo. They picked Eren up off his reservation when he was seven. He lived there plenty long enough to leave with a colorful vocabulary.”

I don’t say anything, not wanting to imagine being seven years old and ripped away from my home with no idea what was happening. It’s scary enough at eighteen. The fact that Eren still manages to smile at all after that has to be some sort of miracle. But I don’t have too much time to think on it, lurching forward unsteadily as the elevator comes to a stop. Jean reaches out, puts a hand on my shoulder to stabilize me, a silent _you okay?_ in the look he gives me that I answer with a jerky nod.

“So, this is Level Two?” I ask, sticking close to him as we move down the hall. Level Three wasn’t homey by any stretch of the imagination, but it was downright cozy in comparison to this. The doors seem heavier, the light more stark. There’s not a trace of softness on Level Two. The thought strikes me that maybe it was engineered to be this way.

Also, the floor is freezing. I should have looked for socks in my room.

“Yeah. Bunch of stuff up here; it’s bigger than Three.” Jean seems even more tense than he was before, gaze drawn automatically upward, mapping out cameras in corners and checking the closed doors. “Training gyms, the classroom, the lab.”

“Lab?” I didn’t miss the little hitch when he said it.

“The Gifted aren’t here by accident, Marco,” he says, voice tight. “You’ll learn the crash course soon enough, but long story short, we’re genetic experiments. They run tests. That’s sort of a given. Third Simple Rule of Being Gifted: Don’t ask questions. Just do what you’re told. It’s easier that way.”

It’s probably better to let the implications of that lie. If the look on Jean’s face is any indicator, I don’t want to know. There are nameplates by the doors that we pass, muffled sounds of yelling and what sound like explosions behind one of the doors marked as a training gym, but he tugs me right along, around the long curve of the hallway until we’re standing outside a closed door marked ‘Counseling Center.’ Jean grimaces, knocks on the door once and doesn’t bother to wait for a response before swiping his badge. The door slides open, and he tugs me inside with a light squeeze of my wrist that more than communicates for me to keep my mouth shut.

Inside, it’s a different world. The floor is carpeted, the walls painted a deep burgundy. It’s a big room, furnished with a massive wooden desk and comfortable-looking chairs. It could be someone’s study, bookshelves lining the walls and a picture of a smiling family perched on the desk. Definitely not something you’d expect in a top-secret government facility. For some reason, the overbearing attempt at comfort only makes it more unsettling to me.

The guy sitting behind the desk in a perfectly-pressed Army uniform, though, he looks like the world outside the door is nothing short of his element, six-foot-something, not a hair out of place, blue eyes so piercing that you can’t look at them for more than a second. He doesn’t pay attention to Jean and I other than a quick sidelong glance, addressing a shivering ball curled up in one of the plush armchairs instead.

“See, Krista, if you’d have just waited, you could have seen him without any of this having to happen,” he says, voice deceptively soft and rational given the state that his addressee is in, legs drawn up to her body and face buried in her knees, nothing to be seen but a quaking curtain of blonde hair. “You can go on back to the gym. We’ll talk later.”

Krista ends up being a tiny slip of a thing, moon-pale and blinking up at Jean and I through tearful blue eyes as she shoves past us into the hall. And maybe it’s just the sedative wearing off, but I could swear that she _flickers_ as she goes, disappears altogether just before she rounds the corner.

"You know that someone probably put her up to it, right?" Jean says, clipped and harsh, eyes narrowing slightly as he looks at the empty chair where Krista was. "It’s not fair for you to come down on her."

"Every choice has its consequence, Jean," the man behind the desk says, very diplomatic in the face of Jean’s obvious anger. "Like the choice to destroy half the infirmary to make a point, for instance."

He knows. That happened thirty minutes ago tops, and he already knows, states it so calmly that something seems off about the flash of fear in Jean’s eyes, gone as quickly as it came as he covers it with a derisive snort, leaning against the doorframe. “He needed something to wake him up. Besides, when’s the last time we actually used the infirmary since Armin got here?”

"It’s a matter of principle, and we’ll discuss it later. Thank you for giving Marco the tour. You can go back to the gym. You’re missing out on sparring."

"Don’t I need to stay with him to—"

“ _Now_ , Jean.”

He lingers in the doorframe for a moment, shooting me a heavy, apologetic look before he heads off in the same direction as Krista. For as soundless as it really is, the door closing behind him seems awfully loud.

We stare at each other for a moment, the man behind the desk and I. There’s a tension I can’t place, and even though I’ve only known Jean for about an hour, I find myself thinking that I would feel better if he was here. The stare-off continues. The man behind the desk breaks first, fixing me with a smile that’s disarmingly, honestly kind, reaching his eyes and crinkling in the corners. For a moment, he reminds me of an Aryan version of my dad. “You must be terrified.”

"Understatement," I exhale on a nervous laugh, rubbing a hand over the bruised place where my IV had been. "Waking up in a sci-fi movie wasn’t exactly on my to-do list."

"I understand," he nods, taking a sip out of a coffee mug sitting on the corner of the desk. "We didn’t take your age into account. Most Gifted kids come to us anywhere from age six to ten. When they’re that young, it’s easier to acclimate them. Our latest bloomer we’ve had so far was Krista, whom you met briefly, and she was thirteen when her Gift manifested. But you, eighteen… eighteen and a telekinetic at that. That’s unheard of. You’re utterly unprecedented, Marco."

"Yeah, the whole talking about me like I’m a science fair project thing isn’t helping the terror factor."

"Of course. Sorry, you’ll have to forgive my inner scientist throwing my tact out the window." He laughs, and it puts me at ease enough to shake his hand when he offers it. "Introductions should have been where I started. Major Erwin Smith, U.S. Army. Long story and a lot of titles short, I run this facility."

I think back to Eren and Jean’s conversation downstairs, remember _Smith was pissed_ and _If they find out, your ass’ll be grass and Erwin’ll be the lawnmower._ The apprehension pulling tight at Jean’s shoulders as we’d walked in, the fear in little Krista’s eyes as she’d practically crawled over me to get out, none of it matches up with this guy, who other than looking like a middle-aged G.I. Joe seems pretty okay, even - dare I say it - nice.

I’m missing something here. There are alarm bells going off in the back of my mind, and I know that there’s something I haven’t caught, but my brain is still too foggy to process what it is.

"I know how hard this must be for you," says Major Smith, tapping open a file on a tablet sitting in front of him, the first thing in it a scanned copy of one of my senior pictures. "It’s a big shock, but I want you to know that I and the rest of the staff are here to help. If you ever want to talk to someone, don’t hesitate to come here and ask for me."

Confused, I just stand there and blink at him for a second. “No electrodes and needles and mad scientists?”

He throws his head back and laughs, big and booming, shakes his head and stands up to clap me on the shoulder. “Your first scheduled activity tomorrow is an interview so we can build your case study, followed by a DNA sample collection that consists of a grand total of one cotton swab in your mouth. Then you go straight into training with the others. No needles or electrodes. I promise.”

So why did Jean look so scared when we walked past the lab?

"You’ve been given a very important Gift, Marco," Major Smith says after a beat, squeezing my shoulder and letting his hand drop back to his side. "All anyone here wants to do is help you harness that for your own good and the good of everyone around you. Did you ever like superheroes when you were a kid?"

I shake my head, swallowing hard. "I’m not a superhero."

"Not yet, you’re not. Why don’t you head on down to the rec room? It’s unlocked, and the others should be coming in here in a few minutes to hang out before dinner."

It’s a clear dismissal. There’s still something not-right tingling along my spine, but I swallow it down long enough to nod and fake a smile. “Thanks, I guess. So I just head back to the elevator, right?”

He’s already immersed in whatever’s in my file, waving one hand vaguely in affirmation. The data-and-stats version of me is more important than the flesh-and-blood one standing in the doorway. Trying not to let myself be too weirded out by that (after all, it’s pretty much how the American education system works, right?), I walk down the gentle curve of the hallway, trying to remember how far along the circle the elevator is.

I can see the big brushed metal doors when a hand darts out of a tiny room labeled ‘Supply Depot 5’ and yanks me inside.

Jean looks positively ghoulish in the dim light of what’s essentially a broom cupboard, sharp features cast in shadow and tawny eyes wide with unspoken warning. I open my mouth to ask him what’s wrong, and he claps a hand over it just like he did in the infirmary, staring at the door. Outside, the sound of footsteps draws closer, then fades away.

"Fourth Simple Rule of Being Gifted," he whispers, the sound like sandpaper rubbing against itself. "The people who run this place are gonna tell you that they’re on your side. They’re not. We’re weapons to be honed. We’re experiments. And when scientists have experiments that go wrong, they terminate the project. They are not on your side. That’s the first thing you need to realize."

Frowning, I reach up and shove his hand away. “That’s a little paranoid, don’t you think? I mean, if we’re so valuable…”

"Did Erwin stand up while you were in his office?" Jean asks, fixing me with this patronizing look that kind of makes me want to forget my avowed pacifism and smack him. "Did you see what he keeps on his belt?"

"I…" I hadn’t bothered to look. And if I did, my head’s still too fuzzy to remember.

"A gun, Marco." His expression is beyond grave, a mix of terror and resignation and pity. "A very loaded, very lethal gun. Every staff member here carries one. Who do you think they’re for?"

I try to come up with a response. He shoves me out into the hall before I can, eyes gleaming in the shadowed depths of the closet.

"Go. They’ll be watching the cameras to make sure you end up where you’re supposed to."

"But what about you—"

_"Go!"_

And I do. There was a rule in there somewhere about not asking questions and doing what you’re told. I can do that.

I glance down at my collar when I step into the elevator - I don’t have a badge like Jean’s to swipe across the sensor. But the door slides open anyway just as I’m turning around to go back and ask for help, making me jump. Up where the wall meets the ceiling, the coy wink of a camera lens flashes at me. Jean was right. They’re watching.

What I can’t understand is how I’m not panicking. The circumstances should be enough to have me a hyperventilating ball on the floor, and yet here I am, prodding the spot on the elevator’s interface screen for Level Three, ducking out of the elevator, taking one step, taking two. Everything I’ve ever known is gone, and I’m still here, taking three steps, taking four. There was something in an English class forever ago, some poem we had to memorize, and I tried to forget it as quickly as I could because the words hit too close, hollow men, hollow men…

This is the way my world ends.

Reverberating footsteps carry me down the hall to where the door of the rec room is open, the impersonal white walls seeming cavernous for how small the space really is. I still can’t find my equilibrium, swaying on my way to the couch. The plasticine fake leather drags at the skin of my palms where they press down on the sunken cushions, and the sensation distracts me for I don’t know how long. What the hell was in that IV, and why don’t I care?

Now that I’m not up and being dragged headlong into the realm of the utterly impossible, a strange heaviness settles on me, weighing at my limbs until I’m boneless on the couch, sinking into the cushions and ignoring the sticky sweat of my skin against the gray pleather. Apathetic. Lost. Maybe it’s not even the medication. Maybe this is just what happens when I have no role left to cling to.

This is the atrophied, abandoned thing that’s been hiding at my core. This is all that’s left of me.

A blur shoots through the doorway, and the boy from the sleeping quarters - Eren, I remember, I think I remember, what is _wrong_ with me? - solidifies in front of me, yanking his goggles up onto his forehead. “Welcome to the trip, man. You’ve got the ‘just chucked face-first into the shit pile’ look about you.”

“Pretty much,” I mumble, rubbing at my temples and trying to figure out why everything feels muted, like I’m living in a world of washed-out watercolors.

Eren rakes a hand through his hair and tilts his head to the side, the action reading more confused puppy than human being. “Are you always weird?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh.” He flops down on the couch, but he never stops moving, a foot wiggling to some inaudible rhythm, fingers twitching and fussing and snapping at a stretched-out hair elastic around his wrist. “I mean, weird’s kind of relative here, obviously. But no one’s gonna blame you for being glitched out, especially after having Jean for a tour guide. I keep telling the guys upstairs we need a welcome wagon that isn’t gonna make the new kids piss themselves, but what do I know, I’m just a test subject.”

“Test subjects…” My lips feel heavy. It takes more concentration than it should to talk, even more to process anything around me. “Is that what we are?”

“Oh man, did Smith not tell you anything?” His eyes are incredibly green, the vibrant kind that you only end up with if you get iris augmentations or if your parents paid extra for custom-designed melanin distribution in your genes. “You really don’t know?”

“All I got from my whole orientation was that I’ve got weird powers and I’m apparently here to learn how to use them.” That, and a profound sense of unease, but I’m not about to mention that when I can see at least two cameras on opposite sides of the rec room. Even if I’ve lost everything else, my sense of self-preservation is still intact.

Eren scoffs, gathering his hair in a low ponytail at the base of his neck and wrapping the hair elastic around it. “Fuckin’ figures. I think Smith gets off on all that cloak-and-dagger bullshit.” My eyes widen and I jerk my head toward the cameras, but Eren just laughs and flips the bird at one of the lenses. “I mean, I can give you Being Gifted for Dummies f’you want, but it’s gonna be way less polite than whatever they’ll feed you when they decide you need to know more.”

“Politeness isn’t really a big issue for me,” I shrug, trying to blink the weird haze from in front of my eyes.

A feral grin stretching wide across his face, Eren cracks his knuckles, bouncing on the uncomfortable couch cushions. “All right, story time.

“So, back in the day, stuff in Kashmir starts getting heated, yeah? The US is already still causing a shitshow in the Middle East, so we’re looking at just going to war with the whole Eastern Hemisphere, which means people dying and resources getting depleted and all that crap that no one wants. So someone comes up with the brilliant idea of ‘Hey, let’s just find a weapon that no one else has.’ Or something.”

“Nukes?” I ask, not sure where he’s going with this.

“No, dumbass, everyone’s got nukes. Big Brother wanted a weapon that was going to destroy people, not infrastructure and resources. Oil and all the stuff that we want from Kashmir, remember? Nuking everything and turning the place into a glass-covered parking lot doesn’t accomplish shit. So they start looking into the really nasty stuff. Biological warfare damages the crops and the land. Just going in with regular infantry and doing wholesale slaughter gets messy. They needed a weapon, so they invented one. That’s us.”

“So the Gifted were created as weapons.”

“Not at first, they weren’t.” Eren frowns, picking at a hangnail and not really paying attention to me. “At least, that’s what they tell us, and who knows how much of that’s the truth. Apparently it started out with custom babies, you know? Those crazy-expensive fertility clinics that let you design your own kid like you’re playing an RPG or something. Someone working on that side of the science industry found this thing. This gene.”

I blink at him. “If you’re about to tell me that I’m a mutant, I’m getting up and leaving.”

“No, no, God, it’s not like that,” he laughs, a reedy tenor. “You ever hear of epigenetics?”

Blank stare. Silence. Eren sighs and presses on.

“It’s like this. Your DNA? It remembers. For generations and generations, stuff from your eighty-seventh-great-grandpappy’s genetic makeup. Stuff that might not necessarily come out in you, because sometimes genes go dormant. Unless something wakes them up.”

“So what was this gene for?” I ask.

“Magic,” says Eren, completely serious.

I burst out laughing, the sound of it choked and hysterical.

“Hey, shut up for ten seconds, it’s about to make sense,” he grumbles, swatting at my arm, but all of the impossibility and pressure has broken over me like a wave and I _can’t stop laughing_ , wheezing and clutching at my chest. All of me aches by the time I reign it in, looking over at Eren through watery eyes and letting little giggles bubble past my lips. He just rolls his eyes and lets me keep it up, talking with his hands as he goes on to explain.

“Look, every culture in the world’s got legends about magic, yeah? Voodoo queens, oracles, that sort of stuff. Me, I’m Navajo, we’ve got _Hatalii_ , who’re like these medicine man shaman guys. And you’re what, Mexican?”

“Dad’s Mexican except for like… one white grandpa. Mom’s from Panama.”

“Got any Aztec in you?”

“Way back. On Dad’s side, I think.”

“Bam.” Eren claps his hands, and I start, halfway off the couch before I see the amused grin on his face and sit back down. “The _Nagual_ , man. Point being, those legends had to have a grain of truth somewhere. Magic existed once, and it died. Who knows how. But the _memory_ of it stayed nice and cozy in DNA through generations, all the way down to us. Of course, the gene itself is rare already, given all of the thinning out that happened.”

“Thinning out?” I’m not sure I want to know.

“Yeah, dude. Humans are nasty when you throw shit they don’t understand at ‘em. Salem Witch Trials ring a bell? Spanish Inquisition? Thinning out. Only ten percent or something of Gifted kids are white because of stuff like that. Conquistadors killed your magical forebearers, smallpox killed mine, and so on and so forth.

“Anyway, some mad scientist in a fertility lab found this dormant gene and decided to poke it with a stick,” Eren shrugs, kicking his feet up on the coffee table in front of us. “And that’s how magic came back to the human genome. Obviously, bigwigs in the military got wind of it, shit went down, the government got the reins on the research, and Project Hecate got the greenlight.”

“What’s Project Hecate?”

“You are. I am. Every Gifted out there is Project Hecate.” He points to the logo on his shirt, the same logo stitched into the gray cotton as Jean’s. “Hecate was the Greek goddess of witchcraft. This thing’s called Hecate’s Wheel; it’s like a big iconography thing or something.

“Magic,” Eren points to the wheel, dragging his finger out to the embroidered swords, “meets military. Project Hecate.”

“So I’m not a mutant, I’m a wizard.” I have to bite my tongue to keep from collapsing into deranged laughter again.

“Something like that,” he nods, pulling off his goggles to fiddle with the straps. “I mean, the higher ups will feed you this buzzkill line about how magic is just science we don’t understand yet, but it is what it is. They can slap half a textbook onto _what_ our Gifts do, but the project’s been running for decades and they still can’t explain _why_. So, all bullshit aside, yeah, it’s magic. It’s been in your blood for ages, and Uncle Sam woke it up for you. Your mom had trouble having kids, right?”

“How did you…” I start, frowning at him. How much do these people know about me?

“It’s the common ground that we all managed to find when we talked about it,” says Eren. “Everyone’s mom went to a fertility clinic to get pregnant. So whatever they did to us, it was something with the embryos. Which is about fifty kinds of illegal, obviously, all of this is, but that’s why we’re such a Big Secret. They scan your parents’ blood for indicators, add a little something extra to the embryos when they whip them up, slap ‘em in the womb and wait. You’re monitored until you hit a certain age. If your Gift manifests, they nab you. If it doesn’t, you’re a dud and they move on.”

“Monitored…” Something’s not right about that, sends a cold weight slipping with a slimy discomfort into my stomach.

The soft _ding_ of the elevator interrupts my sluggish thought process, footsteps in the hall chasing off the creeping dread that had been steadily rising up the back of my neck. Focusing on more than one thing at a time isn’t impossible in my current state, and my focus gets jerked away from my own nameless apprehension when I see Jean being hauled into the rec room, lanky frame leaning on the shoulders of a much smaller Asian girl with sharp eyes and a determined expression.

He looks half-dead, the sickly pallor of his skin worse than the last time I saw him, eye-circles darker, narrow chest heaving with ragged gasps. Eren’s up, off the couch, and across the room before I can even blink, looping his arm around Jean’s other side and helping the girl get him over to the couch, muttering angrily in Navajo the whole way.

“What happened?” I ask. They sit Jean on the couch next to me. He collapses into a shivering heap, knees curled up to his chest and gloved hands fisted tightly in his hair. Each of his exhalations comes out like a sob.

“Burnout,” the girl says, looking grim. She has raised pink blisters all up her arms. Burns. “He came back to training late. Wouldn’t say where he snuck off to, so they ran him until he fizzled.”

Because of me. Because he was warning me. My fault.

Eren hisses something else, looking up at the other kids who are milling in the doorway. “Armin.”

“On it.” A lithe, willowy kid who’s almost as tiny as little Krista worms his way to the front, hair the color of cornsilk brushing his jawline and falling over big blue eyes in badly-trimmed bangs that are a bit too long. He flips them out of his line of sight with a twitch of his head that looks like more of a nervous tic, moving with graceful steps over to the couch and kneeling down in front of Jean.

“No,” Jean grinds out through clenched teeth.

Armin frowns, reaching up like he’s going to press his fingers to Jean’s forehead. “It’ll take five seconds.”

“I said _no_ ,” he growls again, pulling one hand from his hair long enough to swat Armin’s hand away, even that small motion pulling a groan of pain out of his chest. “Get the others first.”

“Stubborn bastard,” Eren whispers, flopping down on the couch and pressing a palm between Jean’s heaving shoulderblades. “Go, Armin. He’ll keep fighting you until you do what he wants ‘cause he’s a fucking _brat_.”

“S’my own fault,” Jean wheezes, shaking even harder. “Had it coming. Got my timing wrong, missed the camera sweep, stupid, _stupid_ … Mikasa’s in a bad way and Krista can’t phase back, they need him more than me…”

In the time that Jean’s been talking, Armin’s moved over to the girl who’d dragged Jean in - Mikasa, I’m guessing - resting gentle hands over the burns that mar her forearms. And then his hands _glow_ , a vibrant green that sinks into the damaged flesh and knits it before my eyes into smooth, unblemished skin. Mikasa flexes her fingers, mutters a thank you and prowls across the room to curl up in a sunken armchair, staring at me from behind a sleek curtain of black hair.

“Krista?” Armin asks, soft, like he’s talking to a wounded animal.

“I’m here,” a whispered soprano rises from right next to my ear, and I have to make it a point to not act freaked out given the fact that there’s nothing there.

“Okay, come here.” Armin holds his hands out, and they do the glowing thing again, the light only fading when another pair of hands appear resting on top of his. The hands grow to arms, to shoulders and down, and ten seconds later Krista is standing where there was only thin air, shivering but giving him a sweet little smile.

“Thank you,” she breathes, shrinking back towards the taller silhouette of another girl who’s still standing in the doorway, dark skin smattered with freckles and thick, wavy hair pulled into a loose ponytail.

“Will you let him fix you up now, dickweed?” Eren mutters, still rubbing at Jean’s back, more concern in his eyes than his voice betrays.

“Marco,” says Jean.

“Huh?” I was under the impression that everyone had forgotten I was here.

But Jean’s not talking to me, he’s raising his head, and the effort of that takes its toll, another pained noise and his hands clenching tighter as he drags his eyes up to meet Armin’s. “Get the new guy. He’s still messed up from whatever was in his IV drip. I couldn’t find a compound name, but I think it’s the same sedative they used on Krista. If you don’t flush it, it’ll screw with his memory, and then we’ll be fu--”

“Okay, okay,” the smaller blonde says in a rush, kneeling down in front of me with a bright, genuine smile. “Hi, Marco? I’m Armin.”

“Hey,” I choke out, the confusion starting to make my head spin.

“Is it okay if I touch you?” Armin asks. I think back to what Jean said in the infirmary… was it the infirmary? Something about failing a class in bedside manner. Armin must have passed. He waits until I nod before he reaches out and presses the pads of his fingers against my temples, a weird energy sparking across his skin in time with a thoughtful frown tugging at his mouth. “Yeah, Jean, it’s the same stuff they used on Krista. I can feel it muddying things up in his system. I think we caught it early enough, though.”

“Wha’ stuff?” My tongue feels heavy. Have I been slurring like this the whole time?

“Basically time-released horse tranquilizers with a nice chaser of Rohypnol,” he answers, lips pursing into a thin line. “You’re up and about long enough to think you’re fine, and then you pass out and lose roughly the past three to four days of memory. You’re in a new, shocking environment. It keeps you calm, keeps you compliant, but the side effects are… undesirable. I can make it better, though. That’s my Gift. I’m a healer.”

Everything feels liquidized, like I’m melting into the couch. The lights are too bright. “Yeah, go f’rit.”

Armin’s eyebrows furrow as he readjusts his grip, holding my drooping head up to hold his gaze. “Listen. When I take this away, everything is gonna hit you really hard. Everything you’ve learned. There won’t be a buffer there anymore. You might panic.”

“Just do it.” Beside me, Jean is trembling so hard that the couch shakes with the force of it, teeth gritted tightly enough that I can hear his jaw groaning in protest. He’s in actual pain, not this vague, uncomfortable fuzziness, and that’s my fault. The guilt’s about the only thing that cuts through the fog until an odd warmth blooms on Armin’s hands and I _feel_ that green glow thrumming through my veins, purging the lead from my limbs and peeling back the haze over my mind like a curtain, and… and… and…

I

can’t

breathe

I’ve been hit in the chest by a speeding train, torn apart at the seams. I’ve been thrown against a wall, shaken down to my bones and disassembled. The scream rises in my throat, but I can’t get it out past everything else that clogs it, lamentations too important to go unspoken but too painful to articulate.

I will never go home again. I won’t graduate or go to college in the fall. I’ll never see my brother or my parents or my best friend again, won’t know a life outside of being this, another lab rat running a maze I never signed up for, a role I never wanted. There’s no sound, no violent explosion, just me sinking back into the couch and curling up until I’m as small as I can be, counting the passage of time in my violent heartbeats and praying that the shock kills me, that this is how I die and it’s all over.

“Hey.” Strong hands, steady hands, solid despite their delicate structure grip my shoulders. Not tugging, not commanding, just making their presence known.

When I finally pry my eyes open, Jean’s bent down in front of me where Armin had been, a little of his washed-out color returned to his face and most of the agony gone from his eyes. The little healer is hanging back now, green magic dying on his fingertips. He must have healed Jean while I was caught in the spiral of my own panic.

“Breathe,” he says. I do as I’m told, because it’s the only thing I know how to do anymore. It rattles in my lungs and aches all the way down, but after a minute, two, I finally manage to inhale and exhale on a measured beat.

Another hand settles against the nape of my neck, smaller than Jean’s, its touch less certain. Krista perches like a little bird on the edge of the couch cushion beside me. “You’re scared.”

I nod, throat still too tight to do anything else.

“I must have been scared, too,” she whispers. “I got here two years ago. I don’t remember it, though. They gave me that stuff that Armin took out of you. But you’ll be okay. We’ll look after you. And I can tell you’re brave.”

Eren laughs, flopping down next to her and ruffling her hair into a blonde cloud around her head. “Look at you, _shideezhí_ , makin’ the new kid feel at home. Good on ya, kid.” Krista smiles at him, and he looks around at everyone else in the room. “So, are we gonna introduce ourselves like grown-ups, or do I have to facilitate an icebreaker game?”

“Please, no.” Apparently all it takes to shock me out of my stupor is the threat of repeating the first theater class of every semester, improv games and all.

Eren cackles, strapping his goggles to his forehead. “Killjoy. Anyway, I’m Eren, I’m seventeen, been here for ten years, originally from Fort Defiance, Arizona. I’m a speedster. Krista, think fast!”

Krista’s too busy wiggling around beside him, tongue between her teeth as she pulls the tie carefully from his hair, combing the dark strands between her fingers. She looks serene, braiding Eren’s hair in fluid, practiced motions, and he just sits there and lets her, a crooked smile on his face as she hums through her introduction without really looking at me. “I’m Krista. I’m fifteen. I got here two years ago, and I’m from New York City. I can turn invisible, and make other things invisible too. I’m working on being able to phase other people, but it’s hard.”

The room goes quiet. Krista looks up from Eren’s hair and says, “Jean?”

He scoffs and leans up against the nearest wall, crossing his arms and looking away. “We’ve already met. Armin.”

Armin has since set up camp on another sofa, picking a stray thread out of the hem of his uniform shirt and flicking his bangs out of his eyes again. “Huh? Oh, hi! I’m Armin, but you know that. I’m sixteen and I’m from Evansville, Indiana. I’ve been here… four years?”

“It’ll be five in like a month,” Eren says, sitting up from where Krista’s been tying off his braid.

“Five years,” he amends. “And you’ve seen firsthand that I’m a healer. Broken bones or the common cold or necrotizing fasciitis; I’m pretty much full-service.”

The girl who’d brought Jean in looks up from her armchair, fixing me with a look so analytical that I feel a little violated by it. It’s like she’s got me completely sized up before she even opens her mouth. “Mikasa Ackerman. Been here eight years, I’m seventeen, I’m from Santa Barbara, California. I’m a pyrokinetic.”

I stare at her. “A pyrokiwhat?”

She stares back unblinkingly and holds her hands out in front of her. There are thick bracelets on both of her wrists, one black and one shiny. She lifts one arm and brings it down hard, striking the bracelets together, and they throw sparks that bloom into a perfect sphere of flame floating above the palm of her hand. “Pyrokinetic.”

“Ah.”

Mikasa blows out the fireball in her hand like a bored child blowing out candles on a substandard grocery store birthday cake and goes back to examining her fingernails.

The girl in the doorway still hasn’t moved, her posture guarded. Her eyes are so dark that they look black, and they sweep in a continuous back-and-forth, only settling on me in passing, like she’s looking for something that isn’t there.

“Ymir.” Her voice is a deep alto, clipped and held tightly in check. “Sixteen. Eight years. New Orleans.”

“And there’s your dose of sunshine for the day,” Eren drawls. Ymir flips him off and stalks out of the rec room. Krista stands up with a worried frown and follows her, but Eren just rolls his eyes, looking over at me. “You doing okay, man?”

“Are you seriously asking him that?” Jean cuts in, the rasp of his voice at odds with Eren’s smoother tenor. “Were you okay your first day?”

“As I recall, my first day consisted of a pint-sized _asshole_ hovering over my bed while I slept and--”

“I did not _hover_ , you just woke up at an inconvenient time.”

These people fit together. Krista with her quiet voice and quiet smiles, Eren’s loud but accommodating personality, the way everyone accepts Jean’s judgment calls and works around them. They’re a functioning unit.

More than that. Nimble fingers braiding Eren’s hair, the good-natured vitriol he and Jean shoot at each other, Armin’s helping hands and the sense of synergy that ties them all together. They’re a family.

And me? I’m the unwanted wrench in the works, coming in uninvited. There’s no role for me here. I feel like I’m drowning, swallowing hard around a lump in my throat that won’t go away, the panic building under my skin again.

“--co? Hey. Marco. Pay attention.” Jean snaps his fingers in front of my nose, the sound muffled by the tough fabric of his gloves. “If you don’t want to come to dinner, you don’t have to. I can bring you food later if you’re hungry. Honestly, letting you just pass out and take the memory block might have been better for you, but… Well. I’ll explain later. Just know that no one’s expecting you to be social while you’re still trying to digest all of this.”

There’s no apology in there, no coddling, but it still sounds strangely… nice. Thrown off-guard, I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes and try to remember how to go about actually saying what I want in a situation. “I’m… I’d rather just go sleep for about a year if you want the truth.”

“I can give you twelve hours before anyone’s on your ass,” Jean nods, looking at a clock on the opposite wall. “Armin, you got anything for him?”

There’s a zippered pouch on Armin’s hip, and he rifles through it with a pensive hum, looking back up after a moment with a faint smile. “Yup! What about you? Are you good? Do you need pain meds?”

“You got most of it.” Jean shakes his head. It’s the tone of voice he used earlier, when he was lying. When he walks over to us, he moves carefully, a stiffness to his movements that speaks of pain _and_ pride. “I’m gonna go talk Ymir out of whatever wild hair she’s got up her ass and try to get everyone rounded up early for dinner. I’ll see you guys later. And Marco?”

“Yeah?”

He looks at me for a long time, like he wants to say something more, but eventually he just settles for, “Remember our talk.”

“Oooo, cryptic,” Eren snorts, stretching his arms up over his head. “Whatever. I’m going to the mess hall so you shits don’t take all the mashed potatoes again. Later.”

He snaps his goggles down over his eyes, and a second later, he’s gone.

“Do you remember which room’s yours?” Armin asks. I nod and lead him down the hall, leaving Mikasa alone in the rec room with that piercing look drilling into my back as I go.

“I don’t think she likes me,” I mumble once we’re out of earshot, not really bothering to think of how ridiculous it is, focusing on popularity in a situation like this.

Armin laughs, the sound of it bright and musical. “If she didn’t like you, you’d know. Same goes for Ymir and Jean.”

“I don’t think they like me either.”

“Well, don’t get offended, Ymir doesn’t really like anyone,” says Armin, waiting outside my door while I change into the pajamas I find in the top drawer of my dresser, soft gray cotton sleep pants and a tee shirt with a Project Hecate logo over my heart, the same place it is on my uniform shirt. “And Jean, well… Jean’s Jean. Affection isn’t his strongest asset. He does care, though, despite what he’d probably like you to think. He and Eren have their thing, but otherwise he can come off a little rough around the edges.”

“What’s their thing?” I ask, poking my head around the door and waving him inside. There’s no real furniture to speak of, so we both end up sitting on the edge of my bed. Armin’s feet swing above the floor where they aren’t long enough to touch.

“Ymir calls it their Gay Telepathy Phenomenon, but Jean gets really mad when she says that,” Armin says, bright and innocent. I choke on my own breath, pounding at my chest to get my lungs to work again, and the healer just smiles, popping his hip pouch open again. “It’s really just that they’ve been together the longest, so they each know how the other works. Eren got here when he was seven, and Jean before that.”

“How long before?” Did they take a five year old? Kidnap Jean from kindergarten? Was he even younger than that?

Armin shrugs. “He was really young. I don’t know how young, though. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

It’s hard to imagine Jean as a child. Picturing a toddler with that sort of intensity and distrust is funny in a horrifically sad sort of way, but maybe that’s the stress talking, still pulling tight at my muscles and fraying at the edges of my brain.

“You might want to lie down,” says Armin, pulling a thin cylinder from his pouch and removing an orange plastic cap from the end of it. “This stuff works fast, and I don’t think I could lift you if you hit the floor.”

My mouth goes dry. “I, uh… I’d rather not have anything injected.”

“Oh hey, no, this isn’t anything like what they gave you when they picked you up!” He rushes out, leaning over and showing me the label. “See? It’s just pure concentrated melatonin. Your body produces it naturally. Putting it in your bloodstream just helps you sleep faster and better. And the syringe is spring-loaded; you’ll barely feel a thing.”

I trust him. He’s got no reason to lie, and as for dosing me up with roofies and tranquilizers… well, Jean had said there was a reason that the Gifted wanted to save my memories of being taken. I can only hope that Armin’s goals align with his. Slipping under my blankets, I look up at him and muse, “You know a lot about this stuff, don’t you?”

“I’m the healer. It’s my job,” he hums, swiping an alcohol pad across my shoulder and lining up the syringe. “And I like to read. The medical books are the most interesting ones we have, so I tend to over-study.”

I don’t push the conversation beyond that, staring at the ceiling and waiting for the prick of the needle. A few long seconds pass, and what’s left of my bravery finally finds me. “Hey, Armin.”

He stops with the syringe just short of my skin, tilting his head to the side. “Yeah?”

“They’re all scared,” I whisper, praying that it’s soft enough for the microphones to not pick it up, if there are any. “All of them. When I met Krista earlier, she was terrified. Jean’s scared, Eren is too even though he doesn’t act like it. There’s something going on here. Why are you all so scared?”

Armin sucks in a sharp gasp of a breath, gaze flicking over towards the door. No one in the hall. Maybe I’ll finally get some answers.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Sweet dreams, Marco.”

There’s a sting like a mosquito on my arm, and the world is blanketed in soft darkness.

My dreams are anything but sweet. I’m running down a street that turns into bright white hallways, in a circle, an inescapable circle, and I’m not sure what I’m running from. There’s a figure in front of me, tall and lanky, yelling in a sandpaper bass to keep up, but my lungs scream and my legs are lead and I _have_ to keep running, have to force myself to carry on even though it feels like all of me is burning. Some part of me can feel my consciousness trying to wake up, but the meds keep me under, chemical shackles that tie me to the horror pounding in my ears. Running, running, Jean’s retreating back getting more and more distant until he disappears altogether and I’m left alone, sprinting for my life from an enemy that I can’t even name. It claws at my back and winds around my legs and I hit the floor, terrified to turn around but compelled to do so by some outside force.

Nothing. When I turn around, I’m staring at a me-shaped nothing.

I wake up screaming, blankets tangled around my legs like the clawed fingers of my own emptiness, still half-trapped in my medicated haze and muffling sobbing gasps into the hand I clap over my mouth. Moments pass, and I can’t make sense of where I am, blindly tracing the lines of my bedframe and nightstand and the clock on the wall that reads 0325. The lights in the hallway outside my room have dimmed, my window looking out so amorphous shadows and the blur that cuts through them before the door slides open.

“Hey,” Eren yawns, hair hanging messy and crimped around his shoulders from where he’s taken it out of Krista’s braid. He rubs at his bleary eyes, closing the door behind him with a quiet click.

“Sorry,” I rasp, scrubbing my hands down my face and trying to pull my heart rate back to normal. “I didn’t mean to wake you, I’m sorry, I-- woah, hi?”

“Dude, it’s three thirty in the morning, stop talking,” Eren mumbles, peeling back the corner of my blankets and burrowing in beside me.

“Mind telling me what you’re doing?”

“Ugh. It’s too early for this shit. Listen, man, physical human contact is the number one cure-all for stress, okay? It’s like this evolutionary psychology thing. Now shut up, accept that I am bro-cuddling you one hundred percent platonically, and go back to sleep. If Jean’s macho enough to deal with it then so are you.”

I cough. “You make a habit of platonically cuddling Jean?”

“And everyone else. When they need it. Well, everyone else except Ymir; tried that once and almost died. I don’t have a sense of personal space, if you couldn’t tell,” Eren shrugs, pulling the covers up to his chin and wiggling over towards me like a toasty, wiry little living body pillow.

Evolutionary psychology or no, it’s easier not to feel afraid with the warmth of another body at my back instead of the fear of my own shadow. There’s still enough of the shot Armin gave me left in my bloodstream to tug me back down, gentler this time, more like floating and less like falling.

“Everyone has nightmares their first night,” Eren says sometime before my dreams claim me again, rolling over so he’s more comfortable on the narrow mattress. “Some of us still have ‘em after ten years. First thing you gotta learn is to trust us. We’re all we got.”

I remember my old roles, remember how to play Marco the Brother, Marco the Best Friend. If fighting off that shadow at my heels means taking those and changing them, bending them into something I can use, cobbling together Marco the Gifted out of my old shattered pieces, it’s a task I’ll have to undertake.

My option to just be nothing disappeared the moment I learned that I was born to be Something.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case y'all were wondering, [this](http://s27.postimg.org/90829uc9v/Hecate_Wheel.png) is what the Project Hecate logo looks like


	5. You Be The Anchor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> as hours move to minutes  
> and minutes take longer to break  
> i will be desperately awaiting  
> when my tongue won't fall apart  
> and we've been sitting here for hours  
> all alone and in the dark
> 
> _mayday parade, "you be the anchor that keeps my feet on the ground, i'll be the wings that keep your heart in the clouds"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS CHAPTER IS OVER 13K HOLY SHIT THIS IS GETTING LONG WINDED
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

An alarm goes off in the black blankness of my sleep cycle, pulling me into consciousness with a protesting groan. By reflex, I reach over to my bedside table to smack at my Bangle’s charging mat until the noise stops, wondering why Mom hasn’t come in to roll me out of bed yet. But then my fingertips meet nothing but cold metal, and I remember.

This isn’t my alarm. I’m not at home. I never will be again.

Another few seconds pass, drowned in the wailing of the alarm, and the light in my room kicks on with a fluorescent buzz, the sudden brightness burning my eyes. Squinting and cursing, I sit up in bed and press my palms over my ears. Some concoction of stress and the sleeping meds that Armin gave me last night have brought on a killer headache as a wake-up call, and the loud screech coming out of a speaker in the upper right hand corner of the room isn’t doing me any favors.

My door slides back on its track, a lanky silhouette outlined against the brighter backdrop of the hallway. Jean looks at me, the longer blond part of his hair sleep-mussed and sharp features settled in an unimpressed deadpan. I give him a helpless look and point at the alarm. He scoffs. “Uniform’s in the second drawer, towels are in the bottom. Boys get first shower rotation in the mornings. If you want one, I suggest you hurry up.”

Just the mention of a shower makes me want one. My skin feels grimy when I remember that the last time I had a chance to bathe was the day I got kidnapped, and I don’t even know how long ago that was. By the time I get over and dig clothes and a towel out of my dresser, Jean’s already gone from my doorway.

Whatever respite sleep might have given me is gone now. Every step sends a spike of hopelessness and panic down my spine, spreading out like a weight in the marrow of my bones and dragging my feet along the cold, unyielding metal of the floor. A rush of wind, and Eren zooms past me, not so much as a “good morning” from someone I distinctly remember falling asleep with. He’s too busy jumping on Jean’s shoulders and laughing maniacally as Jean tries to buck him off with flailing limbs and shouted curses.

“Are you okay?” The other two boys are so loud that I almost don’t notice Armin, sporting a sleepy smile as he falls into step beside me.

“Yeah,” I lie, because lying is the easiest course of action right now, my default for staying functional when my own head backs me into a corner. “Just… headache.”

“Oh, here.” He reaches up and presses two fingers against my temple, his hand glowing green for a second. The pain pounding against the inside of my skull disappears, but the coiled anxiety in my gut only winds a little tighter as the newfound clarity makes my situation all the more real.

Somewhere out there, my parents are waking up to a world where their son is missing. Michael is waking up to an empty room down the hall where his brother should be. Maybe there are flyers up with my face on them, e-bulletins in every local Vegas publication, my friends harassing tourists on the Strip for any hope of someone seeing me.

Or maybe I’ve just faded out, the way I’ve always sort of figured I would. Maybe I’m a vague moment of sadness when someone hears my name – _Oh, Marco, too bad about him_ – gone as quickly as it comes, an afterthought to the world I left behind. I can’t tell which possible reality hurts more, and the stubborn part of me that wants to be a survivor only makes me sadder when it tells me that there’s no use in thinking about that world anymore when my entire sphere of existence has shrunk down to this, to Project Hecate and Facility 4B and The Gifted. This is my world now, walking down the harsh light of a subterranean hallway at five in the morning and trying to remind myself that I’ll be okay if I can just keep breathing. I’ve made it through eighteen years on that principle. It can’t fail me now.

The bathroom is as sleek and blindingly white as everything else in the facility, a row of five stalls facing a row of five showers. I only got a quick look inside during my tour with Jean yesterday, and I don’t get to spend that much time looking around now, yelping and jumping out of the way too late when a towel-clad Eren zips by and snaps his rolled-up pajama shirt at me.

“How old are we?” Jean sighs, pulling his pajama shirt over his head. If everyone else here weren’t reasonably healthy-looking, I’d swear that he was a victim of starvation. He’s almost _dangerously_ skinny, ribs rippling like a seashell’s surface under the washed-out pallor of his skin. There’s something else, too, something else about him that’s just _off,_ but he’s out of sight before I can put my finger on it, stepping into the first stall and tossing his towel over the panel of frosted plastic that slides shut behind him. A second later, the water turns on, the sound of it echoing around the bathroom’s barren walls, and I stop thinking about it.

“Out of bed for all of two minutes and you’re already being a buzzkill. I think you just set a record,” says Eren, hopping into the stall next to him.

The shower’s got a control panel on the back wall that looks like mine at home, but the bio-scan pad next to it is a new addition. I stand there poking at the screen for a solid minute with no results, too embarrassed to ask for help. I’m halfway to punching the stupid thing after another long moment of useless prodding, squinting down at the screen and grumbling, “Genetically enhanced magic human weapon can’t start his own shower, this is great…”

“The bio-scan,” Eren calls over the tiled wall dividing our stalls.

“Huh?”

“Put your finger on the scanner. It turns the shower on.”

“Oh.” The scanner whirs when I rest the tip of my index finger against it, and then something sharp digs into my skin. “Ow!”

“It runs a blood sample for your morning shower,” Eren explains, one soapy hand waving over the wall in reference, “Does a blood glucose count and tracks your iron and oxygen levels and stuff, makes sure you’re clear for physical activity. You go into the training gym all hypoglycemic and you’re on a one-way train to miserable, bro.”

As if on cue, the scanner beeps, a string of numbers flashes across the screen along with a readout chart that spits out percentages and numbers in a bright shade of green, and water spews out of the showerhead and right into my face. I sputter and try to rush, not certain if the shower will cut off on me, but there’s a measure of peace standing under the warm water that I haven’t felt since I got here. I stay there for longer than I probably should, and my the time I towel off and tug my uniform on, everyone else is already standing at the long line of sinks, one of the mirrored wall panels slid back to reveal a medicine cabinet, if you can call it that. It’s really just a long shelf with seven clear plastic cups, each stocked with a toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, and a hairbrush.

“You’re over here,” Jean mumbles around a mouthful of toothpaste, nodding at the empty space and the cup beside him.

I don’t know why I feel so out-of-place standing next to him. Our arms brush, and I remember the tight hold he had on my arm as he tugged me into the supply closet yesterday, the desperation and determination in every whispered word. Now, he just looks sleepy, the dark circles turning his eyes a brighter shade of amber and his damp hair sticking up in a thousand different directions. I follow the direction he’s pointing until I find the cup, frowning at the string of numbers on the label stuck to the front – 835F24. “What’s that?”

“That’s you,” Jean shrugs, spitting into the sink and chucking his toothbrush back into a cup labeled 582B15. “And this is me. Everything you do here has your subject tag attached. Memorize it.”

“What’s the point in memorizing it?” asks Eren, hanging his head upside-down over a hand dryer mounted to the wall and brushing out long, dark sections of hair as they dry. “They just stamp it on all your crap. I don’t know mine.”

Jean raises an eyebrow at him. “You mean to tell me you’ve been looking at 692A10 for ten years and you don’t have it memorized?”

“More important things to do, _shínaaí_. Like not being a broody asshole.”

Jean’s eyes narrow. The floor gives a threatening rumble beneath our feet. Eren just fixes him with a bright, winning smile, emerging from under the dryer and pulling his hair back into a ponytail at the base of his neck. “Don’t break the facility just because you’re butthurt, Jean. Wouldn’t want Smith getting his feathers ruffled. _How many times do I have to tell you boys that your Gifts are not toys, listen to me because I’m a douche with a lot of fancy lapel pins, hurr hurr hurr…_ ”

“I don’t need my Gift to kick your ass.”

“Meet me in the fucking pit, Kirschtein!”

“I’ll meet you as soon as we get in the gym, assuming you don’t mouth off to the wrong person and get yourself put on disciplinary restriction again,” Jean says, a little smirk quirking at his lips as he finger-combs his hair into place and heads for the door. “Marco. I’m walking you to your case study interview. I’ll be in the rec room when you’re done.”

“Asshat,” Eren snorts, glaring after him. There’s a long stretch of silence left in Jean’s wake, broken only by the smooth glide of the door shutting behind Armin when he walks out, leaving me and Eren standing in front of the mirror together.

I clear my throat, very intent on staring at the little handheld laser tool that I grabbed out of the cabinet, trying to figure out if it works enough like an electric razor for me to not burn my face off. “So, did I dream you showing up in my room at three in the morning, or…?”

“Nah, I was there,” Eren shrugs. “You kick in your sleep, by the way. Got a hell of a bruise on my leg.”

“Oh. It’s just that you weren’t there this morning, so I didn’t…”

“Yeah, the tender intimacy of waking up to your angelic face and gnarly morning breath? I’m not about that life,” he laughs, the bright sound bouncing off the tiled walls as he chucks his toothbrush back in his cup and crosses behind me. “I go where I’m needed; therefore I left after I made sure you got back to sleep. And speaking of going where you’re needed, I’d hurry up if I were you. Jean gets a giant stick up his ass about being on schedule. He’s probably squirming in the rec room as we speak.”

I decide that it’s probably best to take Eren’s advice, rushing to finish getting ready and ducking out of the bathroom just as the girls are emerging, bed-headed and pajama-clad, from their rooms. Krista smiles and waves at me, gliding down the hallway. Mikasa, the one who’d carried Jean in from training burnt out and half-unconscious, gives me a nod and a cool, analytic stare, like she hasn’t decided whether or not to trust me yet. But even her good-morning is more hospitable than the one I get from Ymir, the girl who’d spent all of ten seconds around me yesterday before sprinting out of the rec room. She just… _watches_ me as we pass each other in the hall, black-brown eyes fixed on me with something caught between horror and outright pain. I open my mouth, ready to ask what I did wrong, but she grits her teeth and shudders and dives into the bathroom before I have the chance.

Not that I ever felt like I had a place here, but being looked at like I’m something that crawled out from under a rock doesn’t do wonders for my sense of belonging. I bite back the sting of my wounded hopes and head down the hall, telling myself that Eren’s universal kindness and whatever information Jean wants from me will only get me so far.

Per Eren’s warning, Jean’s pacing and fidgeting with the hem of his shirt when I walk into the rec room, hitting me with a glare that I can almost feel boring through my skull from ten feet away. “Do you always take so long to preen in the mornings?”

“Depends. Do you always feel the compulsive need to be a jerk to at least one person before breakfast?” I shoot back, not in the mood to sit back and take whatever misplaced irritation he’s got to throw at me. If watching him with Eren is any indication, Jean’s one of those people who’ll only respect those who sling his own attitude right back at him.

But I could be wrong. For a terrifying moment, I think I am, standing in the doorway and watching the stormy look on his face darken before it dissipates. He clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth and rolls his eyes, shouldering past me into the hallway. “Come on. If you’re late, I’ll be the one who gets chewed out.”

“You know, I never asked for you to be my designated babysitter,” I grumble, falling into step beside him.

Jean lets out a cold laugh, barely sparing me a sidelong glance as he swipes his badge over the elevator sensor. “So you think you can figure it all out on your own, is that it?”

“I never said—“

“Trust me,” he hisses, “I’d be happy to leave you to the wolves, but unfortunately I have an annoying little conscience named Eren, who for some idiotic reason seems to think that it’s my place to make sure you don’t get yourself neck-deep in shit you don’t have a prayer of understanding.”

I try to formulate a comeback, but it’s hard when he’s right, all bluntness aside. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into, but I’m not about to admit that to Jean, especially not when he’s standing there with this infuriating, half-smug expression as the elevator arrives with a ding. So rather than get into an argument I’m bound to lose, I cross my arms over my chest and tell him, “It’s too early in the morning for me to even try to address how condescending you’re being right now.”

“Then don’t,” he snaps, jamming his finger onto the button for Level Two.

“Fine.”

_“Fine.”_

The elevator ride passes in silence, and I storm out into the sterile whiteness of the Level Two loop, taking off up the hallway with no sense of direction. A hand closes around my arm three echoing steps along the metal floor, and I whip around, a bold-faced lie about how I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself already clinging to the tip of my tongue. The change in Jean’s attitude stops me before I let it go, though, something softer in the way he holds himself, almost apologetic. He lets his eyes drift shut, sucks in a deep breath through his nose, and when he looks at me again, there’s none of the vitriol from before left in him.

“I am trying to help you, Marco,” he says softly, gaze flicking up to the nearest camera before it settles back on me. “And I know that I’m an ass more often than not, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that I’m honestly trying to help you. So will you let me?”

I consider it, all of it, for a long moment, standing there with Jean’s slender fingers wrapped around my wrist. I think about the loneliness I felt when I looked at how the others all functioned together, about the constant feeling of being on the outside of my own life looking in. About how I might have brought it on myself. It’s a natural human habit to reach out to others in times of crisis, and maybe it’s because I’m not a natural human that my reaction has always been the opposite. Drawing into myself and waiting for the storm to pass might have worked in the world I left behind, but I’m staring down something too big here, too big to even comprehend, much less battle on my own.

And maybe I don’t have to. It’s a nice thought.

“Yeah, okay,” I nod, giving Jean the closest thing I’ve gotten to a smile since I got here. He nods back, gives my arm a quick squeeze, and lets go, setting off up the hallway.

“They’re going to take DNA samples and process them, and ask you a ridiculous amount of questions while they do it,” he says, walking me past labeled door and the supply closet we hid in yesterday. “Answer them, and don’t lie. They’ll know if you do. Don’t tell them more than you have to, but don’t lie.”

We stop outside of a door labeled _Laboratory 1_ , across the hall from the entrance to the gym. I think back to what Jean had said yesterday about the people who run this place not being on our side, how it had seemed ridiculous right up until I’d watched Mikasa carry him into the rec room half-dead as a consequence of arriving late to something. Aside from feeling bad about getting irritated with him earlier about being uptight with schedules, I’m rooted to the floor by a cold bolt of apprehension that shoots down my spinal column and nails me in place. I’m standing on the threshold of something so massive, so intimidating that I have no idea how to handle it, and Jean can’t follow me. I can tell by the way he looks at me.

“Brave face, Marco,” he hums, swiping his badge on the sensor next to the door. “Erwin can smell fear. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

Brave face. I can do that. It’s a costume for a role, a mask that I have to put on for Marco the Gifted. Brave face. Forget that I’m a breath away from screaming as soon as the door closes behind me and Jean disappears from view.

The lab is high-tech and no-nonsense, as stark and utilitarian as everything else in Facility 4B. The walls are lined with shelves of supplies and hulking, whirring machinery, flashing monitor screens, beeping alarms. There’s a setup in one corner with a treadmill and lots of wires that looks like it’s used to run stress tests, like the one my dad had to take when our family physician thought he might be having heart issues. It looks more like a doctor’s office than the torture chamber that my anxiety had whipped up in my mind. The paper-lined table in the center of the room doesn’t even have restraints attached. Standing in front of a monitor are Major Erwin Smith, looking the same as he did yesterday in his uniform, and two people I’ve never seen before wearing white lab coats with the Project Hecate logo embroidered on their breast pockets. The one closest to me is skinny guy with brown hair and glasses. Beside him is a pretty, petite, younger-looking girl, her ginger hair pulled back in a messy bun with a stylus sticking out of it.

“Marco,” says Major Smith, turning around with a disarmingly warm smile. “Good morning. Did you get settled in? Sleep well?”

“Uh, yeah,” I mumble, wondering if he expects me to confess everything down to waking up screaming and needing Eren to help me get back to sleep. “I’m still figuring out how everything works around here, but Jean’s been really great about helping me.”

“Excellent. You can come on in; we were just getting ready for you.” Brave face. I swallow hard and try to put confidence in every step I take, but it’s hard when I can feel the scrutiny sinking under my skin with every move I make. The guy in the lab coat is looking at me like I’m something he’d like to dissect. Once I get close enough, Major Smith places a steady hand on my shoulder and guides me over to the monitor they’ve been standing around, gesturing at the other two. “This is Moblit Berner, our genius-in-residence. He’s been working with Project Hecate since its inception, and had a hand in proceedings even before the project was militarized. And this charming young lady is his assistant and our head lab tech, Petra Ral.”

“Nice to meet you,” Petra beams, reaching out to shake my hand. She’s got an earnest sort of kindness about her, something in her smile that I really want to trust against my better judgment. “We’re so excited to work with you. We were over the moon when Major Smith told us that another telekinetic had manifested. It’s an exceptionally rare Gift.”

“So rare that only one other person in existence has ever possessed it, in fact,” says Moblit, pushing his glasses up his nose. “And your late manifestation is another point of interest. We’re anxious to look into that as well. If you could just hop up on that table, please.”

The stainless steel chills even through my uniform, goosebumps breaking out up my bare arms. Major Smith looks up from his tablet with another reassuring grin, and I can’t help but wonder exactly what it is about him that seems to scare the hell out of everyone who isn’t Jean or Eren. “I know I said no needles during our conversation yesterday, and it’s perfectly possible for Moblit and Petra to get a DNA sample from a mouth swab, but they’ll get much quicker and more accurate readings from a blood sample. It’s your call, Marco. The last thing we want to do is make you uncomfortable.”

“How much blood are we talking?” I ask, uncertain.

“Three vials. One for the DNA sequencing, one for your indicator counts, and one for your basic medical panel. We use a butterfly needle; the whole process will take maybe five minutes,” Moblit answers, holding up a plastic package containing a tiny needle hooked up to a thin hose, the same kind that would be used to take blood in any hospital.

For a terrifying, secretive organization, they’re being very straightforward. “Okay, that’s fine.”

Petra takes the needle from her supervisor, sitting it down on the table along with three small glass vials and snapping on a pair of exam gloves. “Is it okay if I draw from the right arm? I’m good at this, I swear.”

“Yeah, go for it.”

Moblit and Major Smith go back to the conversation about indicator counts – whatever those are – that they were having when I walked in while Petra straps a tourniquet around my arm and pokes around to find a vein. I look away so I don’t have to watch the actual process, and less than a minute later there’s a small pinch on my skin and the snap of the tourniquet being loosened. “All right! You’ve got good veins. Takes me ten minutes to find poor Mikasa’s.”

Each of the vials is vacuum-sealed with a one-way valve, and Petra fills them up one at a time, placing them carefully in a holding rack once she’s done. The needle gets pulled smoothly out of my arm and tossed in a sharps container attached to the wall. No more traumatic than going to the hospital to get tested for tetanus after I stepped on a rusty nail playing in Mina’s yard when I was eight. “So do I get a lollipop and a Project Hecate patterned band-aid now?”

“No, but I should totally requisition those,” Petra laughs, wiping my arm with an alcohol swab before pressing her thumb over the pinprick hole left by the needle. Her hand glows green for a moment, and when she pulls back, my skin is perfectly smooth.

“You’re Gifted,” I gape.

“Petra was one of our very first graduates of the program,” Major Smith chimes in, turning away from his conversation with Moblit to ruffle her hair. “How many tours have you got under your belt now, Ral?”

“One in Beijing and three in Kashmir, sir,” she says, brushing flyaways back into place and carrying the test tube rack over to the counter. “Although if I can speak freely, I much prefer my current post.”

“Healing is the most common Gift by a long shot,” he explains, pulling up something on his tablet again. “About forty percent of all manifested Gifted are healers. With an influx like that, they just realistically aren’t all needed in the field. So we have some working in the Project Hecate facilities, and we brought Petra over from her last tour of duty in Kashmir to work in the lab and to assist with Armin’s training.”

“Assist in whatever way I can,” Petra shrugs, clicking one of the vials into a machine that whirs and sends a fast scroll of letters across its monitor. “The kid’s a prodigy. He’s probably better than I am.”

“At any rate, while our lab team’s doing the sequencing, Marco, I’ve got some questions to ask you so we can build your case study.”

“I’ll answer what I can,” I nod, choosing the words carefully. _Don’t tell them more than you have to, but don’t lie,_ Jean had told me. Easier said than done.

‘A few questions’ ends up being an obscenely detailed history of my life, everything from if I had the chicken pox as a kid up to when I first started noticing my Gift manifesting. Major Smith never gives any indication of whether my answers are good or bad, just nodding occasionally and jotting a few things down. The interview stretches from minutes to hours, the monotony only broken by Moblit and Petra bustling around the lab, poking at monitors and transferring information.

“Now, the report we got pertained to an incident in your school auditorium,” Major Smith hums after a barrage of questions focusing on my family’s medical history, flicking through a few screens on his tablet. “Can you tell me about that?”

“It’s not much to tell, really.” I’m hungry and exhausted, ready to squirm off the table. Maybe if I rush my answers, I’ll get out sooner. “I was in the theater, a lighting rig broke over my head, and I sort of put my hands up out of reflex. The rig levitated for a few seconds until I stepped out of the way, and then it fell.”

“So, coupled with the cat story that you told me when I asked about your first manifestation that you remember, that report basically clinches that as of right now, you’re manifesting in survival or high-stress situations,” he says, typing in a note. “Which is perfectly normal. That’s how a lot of manifestations start. We’ve only had a handful of kids that exhibited conscious control of their Gift by the time they came to us.”

“But how did you get that report about the lighting rig?” I ask, tilting my head to the side. “Did you guys hack the school security cameras or something?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” Shaking his head, Major Smith looks up from his tablet and sighs. “You have to understand, there are thousands of candidates for Project Hecate out there. But of those thousands, only five percent of them ever manifest. That’s one kid in twenty. Running blood tests and DNA sequencing for that kind of ratio is a lengthy, difficult, and ultimately unnecessary process. We tried it for the first few years, but we realized that there were better ways. Project Hecate’s been running on the Personal Observation System since about four years before you were born.”

“What’s the Personal Observation System?” A cold dread sinks in my gut. I already know.

“Well, when every eligible candidate is around manifestation age, five or six, the project approaches someone that’s a stable fixture in that child’s life. Not a family member, but maybe a fellow church member, a neighbor, a teacher, a family friend. They’re paid to monitor that child for any signs of manifestation and report them. If the candidate reaches age nineteen without manifesting, they’re taken off of observation, and the monitor’s contract ends. You and your brother Michael were both candidates, but we took him off the list three years ago. Long story short, we’ve always had someone watching you.”

Everything in me crumbles. “Mina.”

It all makes sense now. Her demands to know how long I’d been moving things telekinetically, her horror when she’d realized that I’d been slipping beneath her notice for weeks. For almost our entire friendship, Mina was just waiting for me to do something out of the ordinary so she could go running off to Project Hecate to rake in a big bonus. Something bitter curdles along the back of my tongue, sinking acrid down my throat when I swallow.

As if I didn’t have enough trouble feeling real before. If Mina was just a monitor, then how far does the rabbit hole go? Have I ever had a real friend? Has anything in my life been real and simple, or has it all just been an elaborate setup, a snare for me to walk unknowingly into when the time was right? No wonder I’ve spent so many years feeling like it was all I could do to fulfill a role. In the eyes of Project Hecate and God only knows who else, it’s all I’ve ever been good for.

“That’s sick,” I croak, scrubbing my hands down my face and trying with every inconsequential ounce of fight I’ve got left in me to not start crying. “I thought she was my best friend. I thought she cared about me.”

“She did.” Easy enough for him to say, the one who was probably pulling her strings the whole time. “She did care. But it was hard for her to take. She was scared. You see, Marco? This is why you belong here. People out there don’t understand. All the people in your life, all the people you love, if they knew what you were, you’d terrify them. They’d think you were some kind of—“

“Freak,” I finish for him, voice hollow, _everything_ hollow. “Some kind of monster.”

“But _we’re_ not like that.” That same strong grip settles on my shoulder, somehow so much less comforting than the cold grip of Jean’s hand around my arm in the hallway. For all of his faults, he’s never been anything but genuine with me. The reassurance I’m getting from Major Smith feels like a band-aid over a bullet hole. “That’s the entire reason Project Hecate exists. Your Gift doesn’t make you a freak or a monster or anything that most people would think. It makes you a powerful force for good, and you’re here to learn how to harness that. Given time, the Gifted could bring about world peace. Don’t you want to be a part of something like that?”

At the cost of my family, my old life, everything I’ve ever known? Not really. From what I know of world peace, it’s just a candy-coated way of saying that one day someone will get so big that everyone else who’s small will be too scared to fight back anymore.

Jean told me not to lie, but in this instance, the truth is just too dangerous. I put on my brave face and say, “Yeah. That sounds amazing.”

“Erwin,” Moblit says from the other side of the lab, something grave and disbelieving in his voice. “Come look at this.”

A slight, concerned frown tugging at the edges of his unflappable, Major Smith gets up and heads over to join Moblit and Petra in front of one of the machines, staring at the monitor as a readout flashes across it. A summary screen pops up, and he actually reels back a little, blinking in surprise. “That’s impossible. Run it again.”

“The analysis software triple-checks,” Moblit protests, pointing at the screen. “Those are the averaged results. I can even show you the individual trials.”

“But we haven’t seen indicator counts that high since—“

“Since 143A72. I know.”

The Major’s eyes narrow into contemplative blue slashes, and he rolls his shoulders back, tugging his uniform into place. “Get me 143A72’s file. When that DNA analysis comes up, I want side-by-side panels on both. Something’s not adding up here.”

Panic curls tight behind my sternum. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“Not wrong,” says Petra, the only one who isn’t too busy looking at the readout to pay attention to the flesh and blood still sitting, terrified, on the table. She hops up next to me and takes one of my hands in both of her tiny, pale ones, giving it a little squeeze. “Just different, and those differences are what we need to look at. 4B is a research facility. We’re a small focus area in the larger goal of Project Hecate; it’s our job to look for the causes and effects of rare Gifts and abnormal manifestations.”

“So indicator counts aren’t some kind of disease or something?”

“Not at all,” she laughs, pulling up a confusing diagram of a cell on her tablet. “The membrane of every cell in your body is covered in things called surface markers, which are coded by your DNA. It’s what gives your body its sense of self. These markers determine your blood type, what donated organs you can receive, things like that. And in Gifted people, there’s a whole other set of these surface markers, six categories with at least nine varieties in each category, actually. It’s where we get your subject tags from, since everyone’s markers are unique. Every candidate for the experiment has these markers, but for whatever reason, we’ve noticed that people with manifested Gifts usually have higher counts than those who never get their powers. Your counts are extremely high, and that’s strange, given that you manifested so late.”

I was never that great at biology, and I think that Petra can probably sense the headache I’m getting from trying to process all the new information she’s throwing at me. She swipes out of the diagram after a moment, pulling up the same readout that Major Smith and Moblit are looking at on the other side of the lab. “The process of how we get your score number is pretty complicated, but the average indicator count in a manifested Gifted person is around three-hundred. The highest score recorded at 4B is Jean’s, which is three-forty. Yours is three hundred and eighty-nine. The highest count ever recorded was four hundred, and that was 143A72.”

“Who’s 143A72?” I ask her.

A flash of something almost like pain crosses Petra’s face, but she covers it before I have time to really notice, reeling it back until it sits quietly behind her eyes. When she smiles, it doesn’t look altogether real. “The first Gifted. And the only other known telekinetic.”

“So I’m not the only one?” In a situation where relief and familiarity is this hard to come by, I’ll take whatever I can get. “Where are they now? Kashmir? Will they bring them back to help me out like they did with bringing you here for Armin?”

“We lost him.” Major Smith doesn’t even look over his shoulder to interrupt, still staring at two readouts posted side-by-side on the monitor. He’s been immersed in his conversation with Moblit this entire time, and still managed to hear everything Petra and I were talking about. A trickle of unease crawls outward along my limbs. He turns around, clicking his tablet off and giving me this calculating look, like I’m nothing more than the numbers up there on that screen. “Nine years ago, in an incident that destroyed Facility 3A.”

I don’t need to dig much deeper to find out what they all really want from me. As far as Project Hecate is concerned, I’m just a replacement for the dead boy’s file up on the screen next to mine, a second chance for them to fix whatever it was that went wrong before. It’s a heavy disappointment, finding out that my role as Marco the Gifted isn’t even really Marco at all, just a stand-in for a string of numbers and letters that means more to everyone here than I do.

From the moment I woke up in the infirmary with Jean staring at me, I never expected to be treated with any sort of compassion. But maybe the harshness of everything I’ve been through could have been softened by someone granting me the delusion of thinking I mattered. God knows they’ve spent enough time lying to me about everything else.

I think of Mina, and my chest aches.

“At any rate, I think we’ve got enough information from you to build a good, solid case study,” he hums, taking one last look at the monitor before checking something on his tablet screen. “We were in here longer than I thought, though. You’ve missed lunch, and the others are already back in the gym for training. I could send a request down to the kitchen…”

“It’s all good, we’ve got nutri-bars back in storage,” Petra cuts in, shoving her stylus back into her bun and brushing her hands down the front of her lab coat. “C’mon, Marco, I’ll hook you up. We keep them around for you guys to eat after stress tests. They kind of taste like chocolate and plastic, but they’ve got enough protein and nutrients to get you through until dinner.”

She hops off the table and walks back towards the door out into the hallway, but steps to the side of a rack of equipment to where there’s a different door, this one a little heftier-looking, with a sensor mounted to the wall. Petra swipes her badge, and the door slides back with a pneumatic hiss, a wall of antiseptic-scented air rolling out that stings my nose as I follow her. For a storage area, it’s roomy, tall shelves of shining beakers and test tubes lined up alongside racks of chemicals covered in warning labels. One side of the room is covered in glass-fronted refrigerators and freezers, most of them holding test tube racks and tiny, labeled plastic vials that look like they’re for DNA samples. There’s one freezer that’s completely empty except for a black plastic box labeled 582B15, a badge swipe on the door blinking out a slow, even beat. Petra reaches into a refrigerator on the other end of the row, tossing me a twist-off bottle of apple juice and a Tupperware container.

“Here,” she whispers, looking over at the door back to the lab with a conspiratorial grin. “I can deal with a nutri-bar for lunch. I remember how much facility food sucks.”

The container is packed with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a cup of strawberry yogurt, and a brownie. I remember that I haven’t eaten since Vegas, and my stomach gives a ravenous growl. She might as well have handed me a filet mignon. I’ve got half the sandwich in my mouth before I think to look up and mutter out a muted “Thanks, Petra.”

“Don’t mention it,” she says, her smile fading into something more serious. “No, really, don’t mention it. Moblit will kick my butt up to Level One and back if he finds out I messed up your dietary regiment. I just…”

She’s got that almost-hurt look about her again, and I don’t really feel equipped to deal with it, sitting there with brownie crumbs all over my shirt and having absolutely no idea how to address that pain, or if she even wants me to. Petra might be Gifted, but talking to her isn’t like talking to Eren or Jean or any of the others. It’s probably not safe to let her any closer than I would anybody else on staff.

“You just?” My sense of self-preservation has never been quite as strong as my desire to fix all the broken things I happen across. It comes with the territory of holding onto my sanity after a lifetime of never being able to fix myself.

“I knew him,” she says after a beat, teeth worrying her bottom lip. “The first Gifted. We grew up together. And I just… I think he’d be proud, seeing someone like you carrying on the Gift. The kind of power you have could be catastrophic in the wrong hands, Marco. But I can already tell that you’re a good person. I have faith that you’ll use it well.”

“What happened to 3A, if you don’t mind me asking?” If the color draining from her face is any indication, she does. “If you grew up with the first Gifted, then you would have been there. How did it get destroyed?”

“I’m under orders not to discuss it,” Petra says stiffly, taking the empty container back from me and shoving it in the fridge. “Come on, we’d better get you out of here before Moblit dreams up some new test to run. You know where the gym is, right?”

The door where I’d heard the yelling and explosions yesterday. “Figure if I walk in a circle I’ll find it eventually, yeah?”

“Perks of facility life.” Her laugh is hollow as she guides me out of the storage room, through the lab, and back into the hallway. “D’you mind telling Jean that we want him in here for a chem panel before dinner?”

“Yeah, sure.”

The hallway is as cold and blank as ever, but it feels more claustrophobic than before, the walls pressing inward with every step I take. I fight to pull in deeper breaths, but the stale, filtered air doesn’t help, sticking to the lining of my throat and lungs until I’m choking on my own environment, a sudden, desperate need for _outside_ screaming along my nerve endings and lighting a panic in me that blazes white-hot and unquenchable. I’ve never been freaked out by tight spaces – growing up in Vegas, you get used to the horrendous traffic and the densely-packed people everywhere and the overstimulation of all the lights and sounds on the Strip – but I still can’t shake the tight grip around my ribs when I look at so many windowless walls and think about how many feet of cold earth I’m under. Even in the city, you could still see the smoggy sunset, could still drive for a while until you hit the open desert, yellow dust and blue sky all the way to the heat-hazed horizon.

Here, there is nothing but locked doors and secrets that people are too afraid to speak of. By the time I make it the few yards down the hall to the door of the gym, my skin is crawling. The door slides open of its own accord, and I look up at the camera winking at me from the ceiling, another chill radiating in my bones. I wonder if there’s anywhere in this place that I can go without feeling like I’m being constantly watched.

While there aren’t any windows and the fact that we’re underground still hasn’t changed, the size and openness of the gym helps me feel a bit less like I’m being crushed. It’s _massive,_ almost completely circular save for the long wall marking out the radius of the room, the outline of the elevator shaft and hallway on the other side. The walls are lined with shelves that looked like they were stocked to supply some cross-breed between a fitness center and a dojo, medicine balls and bo staves, free weights and kickboxing gear. About a quarter of the circle is equipment, treadmills and a bench press and stuff, and on the other side of the wall is just cleared-out space, a gray mat rolled out across the floor like someone’s been there doing yoga or something.

But the real attention-grabber is what’s happening in the half of the circle closest to the door. Mikasa, Krista, Armin, and Ymir are all gathered around a sunken, circular depression in the floor, a ridiculously tall guy with sandy hair in an Army uniform standing off to the side. Inside the pit, circling each other, are Eren and Jean.

“So, are we laying out guidelines, or are we playing Smith rules?” Jean asks Eren through a feral grin, the usual rasp of his voice evened out to something that sounds smoother, more dangerous.

“No powers, Mister _I don’t need my Gift to kick your ass,_ ” Eren sneers back, cracking his neck and looking back over his shoulder at the guy in the uniform. “Other than that, open season. No three-touch rule. Whoever goes down and doesn’t get back up first loses. That okay by you, Sarge?”

“Knock yourselves out,” Sarge drones, clearly more interested in whatever’s flickering on his eyescreen. “Or knock each other out. Whatever.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” says Jean, and then he moves so fast that he _blurs,_ dropping down into a crouch and sweeping his leg out in a kick meant to knock Eren’s feet out from under him.

But Eren’s already gone by the time the hit would have landed, darting backwards and winding up for a kick of his own that Jean deflects with his forearm, stronger than his skinny frame implies. And just like that, they fall into this graceful give-and-take, each blow and dodge and counterattack so seamless that I’d think it was choreographed if not for the very real impacts and cursing from both sides, the two of them picking up in speed and intensity as their sparring match goes on. I make my way over and stand near the fringes of the spectators, watching, caught between awe and concern that one of them might actually get hurt with as little as they’re holding back. “What are they even doing?”

“Being idiots,” Mikasa sighs, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Jean started talking smack, Eren took the bait like he always does, and they interrupted everything for a grudge match. Same old, same old, really. This happens like twice a week.”

“Too much testosterone over here. I’m going back to training,” Ymir growls, shooting Jean and Eren a disgusted look that she turns on me before stalking back over to where the gray yoga mat is rolled out across the floor and folding herself down onto it. Whatever her training is, it looks a lot like just sitting there, far less interesting than what’s going on in front of me.

“That all you got, Kirschtein?” Eren laughs, ducking back from a punch that probably would have bloodied his nose if it had landed.

Their movements are polar opposites of each other. Jean stays constantly rooted to the ground and only shifts his position to dodge the blows he can’t deflect, as opposed to Eren, who’s flitting around the ring with more interest in letting Jean tire himself out than landing any consequential hits. But for all the time they spend like that, Jean seems to be getting closer to getting Eren off his feet rather than farther away. All of his determination to stay in one place has let him map out Eren’s movements, find the pattern to his ducking and weaving, and when Eren goes to hop away from his next punch, he drops down into that initial crouching kick again, on a direct collision course with the backs of Eren’s knees.

But then something happens, too fast for me to see, and Eren ends up on the other side of the ring, panting. Jean’s jaw drops for a moment before his shock turns to fury, fists balled up at his sides as he rounds on Eren. “You little shit! You said no Gifts!”

“It was reflexive!” Eren protests, adjusting his goggles. “Not my fault that you started fighting dirty!”

“Oh, you want fighting dirty? We’ll fight dirty,” Jean snarls, stomping his foot down hard against the floor. The force it creates is strong enough to send a visible ripple across the metal, knocking Eren off his feet and almost knocking me off mine, if not for Mikasa reaching out to steady me with a bored expression.

Eren goes down with a yelp and a jarring impact against the floor, halfway through a rebuke when Jean comes at him with a punch that he rolls away from at the last millisecond. Jean’s fist hits the floor instead, another shockwave spreading out across the metal. Some of it must have rebounded back into him, if the pained hiss that leaks past his gritted teeth is anything to go by, but he shakes it off and falls back into the stance he’s been holding since the beginning of the fight, trying to snag Eren whenever he skirts too close.

But that’s harder for him to do now, given that Eren’s moving too fast to be distinguished from a gray blur by the naked eye, zooming around the outside of the ring and darting in once every few seconds, leaving Jean no choice but to go on the defensive, throwing off high momentum hits and trying to keep his footing. The more I watch him, I can start to see the gears in his head turning, realization flashing amber in his eyes when he finally figures out a strategy. He maps Eren’s progress again, tracking his high-speed laps around the ring and waiting for him to come in close for another hit. When he does, Jean taps his foot, sending another wave out across the floor. It’s enough to trip Eren up, and he fades into the visible spectrum just as Jean brings over one open palm to halt his momentum.

There’s another shockwave, and when Jean’s hand touches Eren’s arm, there’s a stomach-turning, wet, visceral _crack._

Eren goes down screaming.

“Shit, _shit,_ I’m sorry,” Jean chokes, going even paler than usual, but the apology’s lost under Eren shouting a garbled trainwreck of insults, curses, and angry-sounding snatches of Navajo that I probably don’t want to know the translations of. Dropping to his knees at Eren’s side, Jean plants a hand on his shoulder to keep him still, frowning down at the horrific swelling of Eren’s forearm. “It wasn’t supposed to be that hard, I’m _sorry_ , I… Armin!”

“I’m getting stuff; might need to splint it,” Armin calls from the other side of the gym, trotting over with a first aid kid that’s about as big as he is and hopping down into the pit to kneel on Eren’s other side. “Hey. Eren. You’re not going into shock, are you?”

“If you put that goddamn shock blanket on me, I’ll rip it in half,” says Eren through gritted teeth, sucking in deep, pained breaths. “Sorry. Sorry. This just hurts like a _bitch_ because some _seismic asshole_ —“

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Jean groans, looking genuinely mortified. “Are you okay?”

_“My goddamn arm is broken!”_

“Not as badly as it could be, though,” Armin pipes up, skimming his glowing palms across the swollen part of Eren’s arm. “Closed fracture, clean break. Your narrow focus must be getting better, Jean.”

“Yee-fuckin’-haw, I bet Smith’ll be _thrilled,_ ” Eren snaps, banging the fist of his uninjured arm hard against the floor. “But if you wouldn’t mind putting off Jean’s progress report long enough to _heal me?!_ ”

“Okay, but I need you to hold still.” The glow surrounding Armin’s hands grows more vibrant. Lips pursed tight in concentration, he levels one palm on either side of Eren’s injured arm, his eyes screwing shut.

Eren makes a small noise of discomfort, but he doesn’t squirm anymore, his free hand darting up to grip hard at Jean’s arm. “I can feel it knitting back together, this is always so _weird._ ”

“Shut up and let him work,” Jean gripes back, but he gives Eren’s shoulder a squeeze, thumb brushing the rumpled line of his shirt collar. “Deep breaths.”

“Almost done.” Armin’s face is drawn and a little peaky, sweat starting to bead on his forehead. The room has gone very quiet. Ymir’s still holed up back on her side of the gym, but the other two girls have jumped down into the pit as well, hovering at the fringes of the scene. Mikasa looks like she’s trying to stay out of everyone’s way, but Krista dives right in and worms her way into a spot beside Jean, smoothing flyaway hair back out of Eren’s face and earning a shaky smile in return.

And then there’s me, still standing back and watching from the outside, same as always. I don’t even know where to begin to offer help, and even if I did, I’d feel like I was interrupting something not meant for me, barging my way into the bonds that everyone else has forged. The only thing I’m good for is filling in the empty places that people need, and there’s no room for me here, not with people that are woven together so tight that they act as extensions of each other.

Project Hecate might have its plans, but the Gifted themselves don’t have a part for me to play, and without a role, I’m nothing. Just a shadow in the background, wanting to be something more but not having the knowledge or the guts to make it happen.

The light dies in Armin’s hands, and he rocks back on his heels with an exhausted huff, tugging the zipper on his hip pouch open. He rifles around for a bit and comes up with two of the spring-loaded syringes like what he used on me last night, holding them between his finger and raising an eyebrow at Eren. “Steroids for the swelling and pain meds? Yes?”

“Hnk.”

“I need informed consent, Eren.”

“Yeah, fine, shoot me up,” Eren grouses, wincing at each injection and flexing his arm after it’s done. He still looks a little uncomfortable, but the fact that someone who had a cleanly-broken arm two minutes ago is using it with full function is enough of a miracle to send me reeling, sitting down on the edge of the pit and staring at all of them.

Mikasa walks over to Armin with a bottle of water and a wrapped nutri-bar in hand, watching him like a hawk until he’s finished at least half of both. Eren’s on his feet by then, fixing Jean with a glare so heated that I’m afraid they might break out into another fight. But then his face splits into a big, dopey grin, the bright tenor of his laugh bounding off the walls of the gym. “So the verdict is that you _do_ need your Gift to kick my ass.”

“But I still kicked your ass,” says Jean, the worry lingering in his eyes at odds with how nonchalant he sounds.

“This time. Next time you’re _mine_ , buzzboy.” Still smirking and stretching his arm up over his head, Eren turns around and spots me, waving from the other side of the ring. “Look who’s back from lab rat detail. Yo, Sarge! New guy’s here!”

Sarge blinks his eyescreen off, glancing over at the group of us, confused. “You guys are done sparring already?”

“Jean broke my arm, I walked it off; it was all pretty boring. You didn’t miss much,” Eren shrugs. A faint sense of horror washes over me. If a commanding officer can tune out someone breaking a bone, what passes for a catastrophe around here? “Anyway, Marco, this is Sarge.”

“Mike Zakarius,” Sarge says, walking over to shake my hand. I’m the tallest Gifted out of the whole bunch, and he’s got almost a foot on me. Still, he doesn’t seem that intimidating, more bored than anything else as he looks around at the dented floor of the pit. “Jean, fix your mess and go throw the switch. Then you’re with the new guy for pairs.”

Pairs? More sparring? I just watched Jean break a skilled fighter’s arm without even breaking a sweat. I never even beat Michael in a fight over who got the prize in the cereal box when we were kids. Laughing in a choked voice that sounds more like a death rattle, I ask, “Uh, is it really the best idea to put me with Jean?”

“Yeah, can’t you send him to go bug someone else?” Jean agrees (thank _God_ ), pressing his hands flat to the floor of the pit. The metal hums and begins to ripple, evening out into the flat pane it was before. The outlines of Jean’s hands are blurred when he pulls back, and he shakes them out until they stop, hopping up to floor level and punching something into a control panel next to the door. With a mechanical whir, the floor of the pit rises until it’s level with the rest of the gym, leaving the bottom half of the circular room a smooth, empty surface. “He’s a telekinetic. I don’t know how to train a psychic Gift. Let him practice with Ymir.”

“No,” Ymir says, not opening her eyes or moving from where she’s still cross-legged on her yoga mat.

“You heard the lady. Besides, Major’s orders, kid. He said he wants you working with the rookie. All right, I want Eren and Mikasa, Krista and Armin. Nothing fancy today, guys, just put yourselves through your paces. Show me some hustle and I’ll let you go early.”

“Oh, for the love of…” Jean seethes, grabbing a handful of my shirt and hauling me after him across the gym. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

“Uh, I feel like I should give you full disclosure here,” I squeak, a little too frightened to care how undignified I sound, “Because I’m not the most… experienced? I mean, I went to two karate lessons in seventh grade and dropped out after I learned I’d have to hit people, so what I’m basically trying to say is _please don’t kill me._ ”

“We’re not sparring,” he sighs, hauling a few different weights of medicine balls and a box of what look like loose rocks down off the shelf behind him. “You won’t be ready for that for a while. We’re just doing control work on our Gifts. They pair us off. It’s sort of like having a spotter when you lift weights.”

“Oh, okay.” Now the only threat looming on the horizon is embarrassment instead of painful, agonizing death. Not that the former’s much better, especially when I can feel Jean judging me from five feet away, but I don’t suppose I have all that much choice in the matter. He sits down with his box of rocks and peels the fingerless gloves off his hands, nodding at the medicine balls. “Go on, let’s see what you’ve got.”

“About that.” My face feels hot. If anything, Jean just looks more exasperated. “I can’t use my Gift.”

“Of course you can,” he snorts.

“No, really, I can’t.”

He tosses a rock back and forth between his slender palms, looking at me like I’m a level of stupid that can’t even be described. “So if you can’t use your Gift, how did they catch you? You had to manifest somehow.”

“Well, see, there was this cat…”

Jean shuts his eyes, leans over, and begins to softly, repeatedly smack his forehead against the wall.

“Hey, I’m just telling the truth!” I gripe at him, sitting down and crossing my arms across my chest. “I’m a late bloomer and I suck, whatever, I don’t need you being rude about it. It happens at random. There was the cat thing, a thing with my brother’s keys, but the only time it really did anything big was when this three-hundred pound lighting rig was about to fall on my head.”

Jean looks up at that, head tilting to the side. “Survival reflex, huh?”

“That’s what Major Smith said in my interview, yeah.”

“Easiest thing to train,” he nods, tossing the rock up in his hand once more before he chucks it right at my face. “Think fast!”

“Agh!” I turn my head away and throw my hands up, bracing for an impact that doesn’t come. When I turn back around, the rock is bobbing up and down midair, barely brushing the tip of my nose. I sputter out something meant to be angry but reading more like flustered, and it drops into my lap with a dull _thud_ as I glare over at Jean. “You could have broken my face!”

“Gee, what a shame that there isn’t a full-service hospital standing twenty yards away,” he drawls, pointing over to where Armin’s watching Krista fade in and out of visibility. “And the point is that I _didn’t_ break your face, because you used your Gift. Now, do it again.”

“I – hey!” He tosses another rock, and I flinch back, but it stops just short of smacking into my head, just like the last one, hovering for a second before it falls. “Would you stop that?!”

“No.” Jean throws another rock. And another one. And another one.

“What’s the point of this?!” I huff, throwing one back at him as soon as there’s a pause in his barrage. Jean catches the rock one-handed, curling long fingers around it and squeezing his fist. When his hand opens again, a stream of dust spills out onto the floor. Show-off.

“Well, we don’t have much by way of entertainment down here,” he shrugs. I glare at him even harder, and he laughs. There’s no malice in it though, the gravelly rasp of his voice catching along the sound as he drops the rock he’s holding and raises his hands as if to show me he’s unarmed. “No, but it’s to help you latch onto something in that reflex. Whenever you use your Gift, you get a feeling. It’s different for everyone. We call it your anchor. It’s the way you visualize your power source. Armin says he feels a glow in his chest and channels it from there. I kind of feel like my bones are humming, if that makes any sense. You ever feel something like that?”

“No.” A quick refute, but when I think back on it, there _has_ been something there, the feeling under my skin that I tried to drown with Mom’s sleeping pills, the spark in my veins when I’d held the lighting rig over my head. “Wait, yes. It’s weird, though. It sort of feels like static electricity. It starts at the back of my neck and sort of spreads out under my skin, down my arms. Is that it?”

“Sounds like it.” Frowning contemplatively, Jean grabs another rock out of the box and sets it down in front of me. “Now, remember that feeling. Try to tap into it. Move this.”

I feel like an idiot, sitting on the floor and staring at a rock while everyone else works magic like it’s second nature, Mikasa sculpting flames into intricate plumes and Eren running so fast that he can arc up the wall and across the ceiling in some kind of superhuman parkour. After all the time I’ve spent feeling like being perpetually normal was the worst thing that could happen to me, it’s either a comfort or an awful revelation that being substandard can be much, much worse.

“Don’t pay attention to them,” says Jean, ducking down into my field of view.  “Breathe deeply. Close your eyes if you have to. The first steps are all about visualization. Picture the rock moving, and use your anchor to do it.”

I do as he tells me, sucking in gulps of air and clamping my eyes shut, trying to blank everything else out. It starts like a spark, a faint prickle at the base of my skull, but I latch onto it like a drowning man to a life preserver, clinging to that familiar energy and letting it flow outwards, crawling through my veins all the way down to my fingertips, a reflexive flick of my wrist wrist expelling some of the static buildup.

“Good.”

“What?”

“Open your eyes, Marco.”

I do. And the first thing I see is Jean, holding the rock that had been on the floor between us a few seconds before. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that he looks pleased.

“You tossed it right to me,” he says, placing the rock back on the floor with a sharp click. “You’re hand channeling, but that’s to be expected since you’re new.”

“What’s hand channeling?” I ask.

“Reflexive channeling of power through your hands. It’s a common rookie mistake, but if you get too set in it, your combat form will suffer. What happens if an adversary ties your hands? You have to be able to use your entire body to channel. It’s a little different for people like Armin and me, since we have to be physically touching something for our Gifts to work, but the others can channel with their entire bodies. They’ll probably make you do exercises with your hands tied for a few months until you get the hang of it, but that’s standard – woah, hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m channeling with my whole body,” I tell him, tongue poking out between my teeth in concentration as I lift the rock back up and send it spinning in a wobbly orbit around Jean’s head. Just for good measure, I sit on my hands, letting the sparks spread out until they’re under my skin from head to toe. It’s actually easier this way, _thinking_ the path I want the rock to take instead of trying to push it with my movements. For every second I keep it in the air, it gets a little steadier, its path a little smoother.

“I’ll be damned,” Jean whispers. “Erwin’s going to have a field day with this.”

“How do you get away with that, by the way?” I guide the rock smoothly back into Jean’s outstretched hand and let my anchor fade out, the static buzz dying in my veins. “Calling him by his first name, I mean. Seems sort of insubordinate.”

Jean chews on the inside of his cheek and looks away, evasiveness incarnate. “He lets it slide. We’ve been around each other for a long time.”

Armin had said that Eren was the second-longest resident, and that Jean had been here even before him. _He doesn’t like to talk about it._ “How long is a long time?”

“A long time,” he says, clipped and sharp, and that’s the end of it.

“Okay, I just called into the office,” Sergeant Zakarius shouts from the other side of the gym, and everyone stops what they’re doing, waiting for whatever it is he’s got to say. “Major says that you guys can have free reign on Level Three until dinner, but we’re staying late in the sim lab tonight.”

“I call the comfy couch,” Eren yells, speeding out of the room before anyone else can even think to contradict him. The rest of them file out in a more orderly fashion, Mikasa and Armin talking about a new technique she’s been thinking about while Kirsta pads over to Ymir and lays a gentle hand on her shoulder, stirring her from her spot. She jumps and blinks like she’s actually startled - has she been taking a nap this whole time? – before she gets up and falls into step beside the tiny blonde, disappearing into the hallway.

“Hey, Mike, you care if we hang back for a bit?” Jean asks, back to tossing a rock between his hands again. “The new guy just kicked his hand channeling in about thirty minutes flat. I want to see what else he’s got.”

“Fine by me,” he shrugs, digging in the cargo pocket of his fatigues and tossing something at me feet with a plastic clatter. “Here’s your badge, by the way. Don’t lose it.”

It’s a piece of white plastic stamped with my name, subject tag, and the Project Hecate logo, attached to a clip that will hold it to my shirt. Simple, inconsequential, but when I pin it to the same place on my shirt that Jean has his, it feels a little more like belonging.

“Kind of weird that they’re so cool with leaving us in here alone,” I huff as soon as the door shuts behind Sarge’s retreating back.

“Oh, they’re keeping an eye on us,” says Jean, nodding up at a camera mounted against the far wall before he kicks one of the medicine balls over towards me. “See if you can lift that. I’m going to work on my stuff.”

“What, playing with rocks?”

“Fine control,” He glowers, holding the rock in his palm and staring at it. His hand shudders and blurs again, a cloud of dust flies up, and when it settles, the jagged rock has become a perfectly even cube. “I’m plenty good at wrecking anything they point me towards, but when it comes down to being something other than a force of wholesale destruction, I’ve still got work to do. When I don’t get my focus narrow enough, I do things like break Eren’s arm. Again.”

“You’ve broken his arm before?”

“And a leg. And a few ribs. He gave me a hell of a skull fracture last year. Blood everywhere. Your perspective of horrible injuries gets a little skewed when you know somebody that can heal anything just by touching it.”

“Yeah, I guess.” The medicine ball requires more focus to lift, but I manage to get it up after a few minutes, piloting it in a slow figure-eight that loops around me, then Jean, then back to me again. “So is there a reason you wanted to stay here while after everyone else left?”

“Just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” Jean hums, trying to get the rock he’s holding to break down to a perfect sphere. “I’ve heard the interviews can get brutal.”

“Eren’s right. You are a mama bear,” I laugh.

Still looking at his work, Jean taps a finger against the floor, shaking me off balance to the point that I fall on my back and break my focus. The medicine ball drops onto my stomach so hard that it knocks the air out of me with a painful _whoosh_. Jean’s smirking when I sit back up.

“Rude,” I wheeze, trying to get the ball back in the air again. “But yeah, it wasn’t exactly fun. My best friend turned out to be my monitor.”

Jean blinks. “So?”

The ball stutters an inch off the ground and falls back to the floor. “Are you serious? _So?_ So she spent our entire lives lying to me. It was kind of a hard pill to swallow.”

“Yeah, and?” He shrugs, blowing the dust off a pyramid and setting it aside. “It’s not like she’s an issue anymore. You’ve got bigger things to worry about here.”

“I can’t even _believe_ …” I hiss, getting to my feet and strongly considering throwing the medicine ball at his head. “You’ve got no right to say something like that to someone, Jean, what the actual hell?!”

“I’m just telling the truth!” He protests, rising as well and tossing his latest project back in the box. “You’re involved in something so big that you can’t even begin to grasp its magnitude, and you’re whining about the circumstances that brought you here when there’s nothing you can do to change them! I’m just trying to tell you that you need to understand the gravity of the situation!”

“Oh, I’m _sorry._ ” I’m not used to myself sounding so cold, not used to tasting the venom that coats every syllable bitter in my mouth. “I’ve had a grand total of one day to come to terms with the fact that I’m a genetically-engineered freak of nature who’s part of some secret government plot, and that I can never go home or see my mom or my dad or my brother or anyone else I care about ever again. I’ve had _one day_ to deal with losing everything I’ve ever known, so I am _so sorry_ for not being quicker to grasp the gravity of the situation, Jean, really, I am. Guess I’ve been a little busy getting stomped on by the gravity of my whole life going to shit.”

He pauses halfway to a retort, deflating and looking at his feet. It’s moments like these when I realize how small he actually is, when that presence he carries around with him fades and leaves him as the spindly frame that all his bravado sits on, thin wrists and narrow hips and bony shoulders that slump under an invisible weight as he backs down from the argument and leans against the shelf.

“I… you’re right,” he says, still not looking at me. “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know what that’s like.”

“How can you not know what it’s like?” I say, voice shaking as I shake my head in disbelief. “That’s the one thing we’ve all got in common. We’ve all lost everything we had out there.”

“Not me.” I can’t tell if Jean is more angry or sad when he says it, picking up the medicine balls I was using for practice and flinging them back on the shelf. “You know how I said I’ve been here for a long time?”

“I shouldn’t have asked you about it,” I try to cover, “Armin told me that you don’t like talking about it; I should have listened.”

“I don’t even know when they took me,” he laughs, the sound empty and cold. “My Gift manifested when I was a baby. My first memories are all here in 4B. I don’t remember the world out there at all. Maybe you think I’m the lucky one for that, but you haven’t lost everything, Marco. At least you still remember what the sun feels like. At least you know what you left behind.”

It would have been more pleasant if he’d actually punched me in the stomach instead of leaving this awful, heavy churning in my gut. I stand there with all of my anger ebbing away into shock,watching those careful walls of his crumble.

It’s a physical shift, almost like watching a time-lapse of the seasons changing, a fire burning to ash, an abandoned city falling to dust. He curls in on himself slightly like something’s dealt him a heavy blow to the chest, one spindly hand shooting out to grab the shelf in an effort to keep himself upright. But it’s his face that undoes me. The usual careful impassivity is gone now, and the hurt that sits in its place is crippling. Jean’s been this emotional rock since I met him, standing indifferently to everything the world throws at him like he’s seen it all before. But something in that admission has ripped his foundation out from under him, turned him into something that I know the look of all too well - a scared, sad, lost little boy. The placid veneer drops out from behind his eyes, and I find myself wishing I could look away. It’s like peeling back sterile white bandages over a gaping, festering wound, a whole tidal wave of things I never wanted to see jumping out and aiming with deadly accuracy right for the sinking pit in my stomach. For a horrifying second, he looks like he might either pass out or burst into tears. I instantly wish I had never opened my mouth.

I liked him better numb. It was easier to write him off as an arrogant jerk that way, when I could pretend that we didn’t have any common ground at all.  
  
Unsure of the level of hell I’ve just unleashed, I can only stand there and watch with a morbid brand of fascination as Jean goes step-by-step through the process of putting himself back together. It starts in his eyes, the wounded look reeled back in until they’re nothing but unreadable amber disks again. Then his face, back to a neutral deadpan. Then his posture, shoulders back and head high in a good imitation of confidence. And then his demeanor, walls back up higher than ever before. And he stands there, staring at me, an eyebrow slowly inching upwards as if to ask  _What are you looking at?_  
  
As if I hadn’t seen him falter.

“That’s terrible,” I whisper.

“I didn’t ask for your pity,” he snaps. “All I want is for you to get some damned perspective and realize that there are bigger things than your losses to worry about. All of that stuff out there that you’re killing yourself over losing? Drowning in self-pity won’t bring it back. You’re here now, and if you want a prayer at making it, you’ve got to keep your wits about you. The happy-go-lucky bullshit that the staff’s feeding you now stops after your first week or so. The life you had is over. You’re Gifted. Start acting like it.”

That’s my role, then. And if Jean is right, it’s one I’ll have to play if I have any hope of survival.

“Okay.”

“Glad you understand,” Jean huffs, picking one last rock up from the box and turning it over between his fingers. “I’ve been wanting to try more intricate stuff, but I don’t know what to do.”

“Make a flower,” I offer, thinking back to the flame-petals Mikasa had been crafting earlier.

Jean gives me a blank look.

“What?”

He’s quiet for a long time. “I don’t know what one looks like.”

Part of me wants to apologize, but part of me knows that he’d probably punch me if I did. So instead I run over to where there’s a clipboard and pen hanging from the side of one of the shelves, tearing off scribbled notes about inventory to get to a blank piece of paper. I’m not much of an artist, so the work comes out looking like a third grader drew it, but in two or three minutes I’ve got a sky full of clouds, a shining sun, and a grassy hillside with a single daisy sprouting up out of the ground. I rip the paper off and head back over to Jean, handing it to him. “There are tons of different ones, but my favorites look like that.”

“Huh,” he frowns, staring at the drawing for a second and nodding to himself. The way he shapes the rock this time is different, going in with a single blurred finger and tracing out petals, smoothing ragged edges and brushing off dust until he’s got a stone daisy blooming in the center of his palm.

“Pretty good fine control, if my opinion matters,” I tell him.

“It does,” he says, handing me his creation. The rock is hot to the touch, leftover dust settling in the crevices of my hand.

With pen on paper, I said _I’m sorry,_ and with smooth stone and the closest thing he gets to an honest smile, he said _There’s nothing to forgive._

“Oh, Petra wanted me to tell you that they want you in the lab for a chem panel before dinner,” I remember, snapping my fingers.

Jean grimaces, looking at the door and shifting his weight back and forth. “Okay. You should probably head downstairs. Your badge will work on the elevator, so you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“Are you going to be okay?” I ask him, stopping in the doorway, not certain if I’m willing to leave him alone.

“Are any of us?” Jean snorts, tracing a pattern in the rock dust on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “Go on, Marco. I’ll be fine.”

Just before the door shuts behind me, I see him fold up my scribbled drawing and tuck it into his pocket. I stick the stone flower in my own, and the weight of it resting against my hip as I head back to the elevator feels like understanding something for the first time since I fell into this mess. It’s not much, but it’s a light in the dark, a spark I can latch onto and grow from.

It’s an anchor.


End file.
